Visual impairments in tobacco use disorder

Impairments of facial detection in tobacco use disorder: baseline data and impact of smoking duration

“…However, this approach calls for further studies using other mediators. Considering past findings about the relationship between TUD and visual impairments, 7 it is possible that long-term smokers have some degree of impairment in facial detection, particularly related to the early stages of visual processing. Although no neural mechanisms supporting this hypothesis are yet known, an explanation can be inferred from some of the alterations induced by the existing components in tobacco.…”

“…29 Smokers were allowed to smoke until the beginning of the experiment (as in our previous studies) and were free from cognitive disorders. 7 All of the participants with TUD had no comorbidities such as attention disorder and did not use nicotine patches in recent years. In addition, the participants with TUD reported no withdrawal or attempt to stop smoking.…”

“…These participants were part of a moderate-scale database investigating TUD, and some of the controls participated in previous tasks. 6,7 Stimuli and procedures The stimuli were run on an ACER 8565U computer with a NVIDIA MX130 graphics card and presented on a 17-inch LED monitor with 1,366 Â 786 resolution and a refresh rate of 85 Hz. All of the measurements were performed with binocular vision.…”

“…5 Some authors report that smoking and TUD appear to be linked to visual impairments. [6][7][8] Their main findings indicated that healthy nonsmokers had better performance for several domains of early-stage visual processing (e.g., contrast processing and chromatic discrimination) than heavy smokers. An unanswered question, however, is whether TUD affects not only form and color perception, but also facial detection.…”

Schizophrenia patients using atypical medication perform better in visual tasks than patients using typical medication

“…We found similar trends for the cognitive tasks, where patients taking atypical performed slightly (but not significantly) better than patients taking typical antipsychotics. The exclusion criteria for SCZ patients were: (a) presence of neurological disorders, such as intellectual disability, (b) presence of comorbidities, such as depression or multiple diagnoses, (c) changes in medication in the last 6 months, (d) discontinuation of medication at any time, and (e) chronic heavy smoking (Fernandes et al, 2018c) as assessed by the Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence (score > 6; Heatherton et al, 1991). This information was obtained from a continuous study of the medical records (Fernandes et al, 2018d).…”