In a study of human postmortem hippocampus, smoking was found to produce relatively subtle, but statistically significant changes in gene expression.23 In non-mentally ill control cases, nicotine differentially altered hippocampal gene expression of transcripts functionally associated with cell motility, immune response and the NMDA postsynaptic density. Smoking produced a significant interactive effect on gene expression in the brain of schizophrenic cases, with individual transcripts exhibiting different patterns of expression change across smoking/non-smoking schizophrenic and control cases.
