Newhouse

In 2012, Newhouse and Levin published a randomized controlled trial showing that short-term nicotine use improved cognitive performance in people with mild cognitive impairment.

Newhouse says he regularly fields questions from patients curious about trying nicotine for early Alzheimer’s concerns, though he doesn’t have data on how many physicians are actually discussing it with their patients.

“If it turns out to work for certain kinds of cognitive problems, then it’s a pretty cheap and easy-to-access treatment,” says Newhouse.

“The word we use is modulate—so they modulate nerve cell–to–nerve cell transmission throughout the brain,” says Paul Newhouse, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology and the director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt University.

Over Zoom, Newhouse shows me a U-shaped graph.