Smoking and Brain Damage
It’s long been known that the effects of smoking can be very harmful to your health. People who smoke cigarettes are at a higher risk of developing cancers, particularly lung cancer, but now scientists have also added dementia and Alzheimer’s disease to the long list of ailments.
“It is known that there are associations between smoking behavior and lower total brain volume and gray and white matter volumes,” reports the study in the Biological Psychiatry journal. “However, a significant question remains about whether these associations represent predisposing features for the risk of developing cigarette smoking or are consequences of cigarette smoking.”
As a result of analyzing data on brain scans and genetic risk factors they concluded that daily smoking led to smaller brains, and that the decrease in brain matter loss is directly related to the volume of smoking – i.e. heavy smokers had greater brain matter loss. And worse still – the more years someone smokes the more brain volume is lost forever.
“You can’t undo the damage that has already been done, but you can avoid causing further damage,” said Yoonhoo Chang, one of the authors of the study. “Smoking is a modifiable risk factor. There’s one thing you can change to stop aging your brain and putting yourself at increased risk of dementia, and that’s to quit smoking.”
When you add in the fact that brains naturally shrink over time, a smoker’s brain prematurely ages, increasing the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. After looking at the data, the researchers of the paper estimate that a massive 14% of all global Alzheimer’s cases could be caused by cigarette smoking.
This research supports the evidence by a group of geneticists in Denmark’s Aarhus University who found clear data that smoking actually lead to mental disorders. What had been unclear up to then was whether smoking caused the mental illness or whether people smoked because they already had a mental illness.
However, the Danish researchers also suggested an additional piece of information. Most of the smokers they looked at carried a “smoking-related gene” which seems to make certain people more predisposed to smoking, who then also develop mental illness. Meaning, some people are genetically more likely to smoke than others.
“The people in the data set who carried the smoking-related genes but did not smoke were less likely to develop mental disorders compared to those who carried the genes and smoked. Because the genetic variants also seem to be linked with the risk of mental illness, this used to be a bit blurry. But in this study, we demonstrate that it’s probable that the risk of starting to smoke causes the risk of developing mental disorders to increase due to the ‘smoking-related genes.’”
Whatever the reason to start smoking, there are many more reasons to stop smoking as soon as possible.
