Activation of α7 nAChRs has been shown to enhance neuronal resistance to ischemic and other types of insults [6,31,32,38,39,63,82] as well as improve cognitive performance in patients and animal models of schizophrenia [49,72,73,83], dementia [56,61,84] and traumatic brain injury [39]. Here, CHRNA7 is linked to schizophrenia.