Smoking Has an Impact on Alzheimer’s Disease
We certainly didn’t need any more reasons to quit smoking or better yet never take it up. Even though this habit causes hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United Staes and almost 100,000 in Canada people still do it. What a powerful force for evil nicotine is.Here is just a little more incentive to give up the cigarette habit….
By Amy Norton
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older adults who smoke may face an elevated risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests. In an analysis of two dozen previous studies, UK researchers found that older adults who currently smoked were at greater risk of Alzheimer’s than were non-smokers. When the results of the studies were pooled, current smokers had a 79 percent higher risk of the memory-robbing disease. There was also evidence that smokers had higher risks of other types of dementia, as well as age-related mental decline. However, those links were not statistically significant — meaning the findings could have been due to chance. The bottom line, the study’s lead researcher told Reuters Health, is that smoking "is likely to be associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease." That should give people one more reason to quit the habit or, better yet, to never start, said Dr. Ruth Peters, of Imperial College London. She and her colleagues report the findings in the online journal BMC Geriatrics. Smoking may contribute to dementia in the same way that it affects cardiovascular health — by damaging the blood vessels and impairing blood flow. As people age, this may accelerate damage to the brain tissue. On an encouraging note, Peters and her colleagues found that while current smokers had a higher Alzheimer’s risk across the studies, former smokers did not. It’s not clear what this means, according to Peters, but it is possible that the excess risk of Alzheimer’s declines once smokers quit. "In any event," she said, "ceasing to smoke is already known to be beneficial in terms of other health outcomes and it is possible that this could apply to dementia also." SOURCE: BMC Geriatrics, online December 23, 2008.
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS AND STROKE
Mail this post
I had a depressed nowadays. After that I believe that world is going to wrongsituation worse persons. But I looked your website and currently I agree that in future we will have lovely years by skilled people as you.
Hello there, I simply sought to start by praoclaiming that the contribution at this point is simply amazing. I’m sure everyone does an excellent job here and i just want to make that known. Maybe you have pondered blogging for money?