two studies69 73 from the review as the maximum dose of varenicline used in these studies was only 1 mg once a day—that is, half of the recommended maximum dose. Hong and colleagues examined varenicline treatment in 20 smokers and 15 non-smokers with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and found no evidence that varenicline worsened psychiatric symptoms in these patients.69 Mocking and colleagues studied the effects of varenicline on emotional and cognitive processing in 21 healthy adult non-smokers and concluded that it did not cause problems in emotional processing or impulsivity, providing less support for a possible depressogenic effect of varenicline.73 Furthermore, a secondary analysis, which included all doses of varenicline in the original trials and these two excluded randomised controlled trials, produced similar findings to our main analysis (see appendix 6).
