Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age

by Sue Armstrong

Then in 2010, Janine Cataldo and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, published a paper describing how they had systematically analysed the design, methodologies and findings of 43 original, international studies carried out between 1984 and 2009 to try to settle the matter. Significantly, they also looked at the funding and affiliation of the scientists involved to try to eliminate potential conflict of interest in the results – something that, surprisingly, seems to have been overlooked by the journals that published their reports. What was not surprising, however, to anyone who had followed the lengths to which the tobacco industry went to discredit the evidence of a link between smoking and cancer, was that Cataldo and her colleagues found Big Tobacco's fingerprints all over the evidence concerning Alzheimer's. Discovering which bits of research and which scientists the industry had supported was a major sleuthing job. It involved trawling through a massive pile of previously secret internal papers held in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library that was forced to open its archives when it faced litigation brought by irate customers for personal damages and deaths from smoking. The researchers found that 11 of the 43 studies included in their meta-analysis had been conducted by scientists with links to Big Tobacco, of which only three had disclosed their affiliation. None of the 11 studies found an increased risk of Alzheimer's among smokers – indeed...