Nov
26
2012

Brain-melt with every puff?

Smoking messes up your brain's cognitive skills: Sure it's funny now, but see if you can remember to laugh about it in your 50s, pal.
Smoking messes up your brain's cognitive skills: Sure it's funny now, but see if you can remember to laugh about it in your 50s, pal.Courtesy jaduarte
I don’t know why this should surprise anyone, but a study coming from King’s College in London suggests that smoking not only adversely affects your physical health but also damages your mental health, reducing your brain’s capacity to learn, reason, and remember.

The study was published in the journal Age and Aging and involved lifestyle data gathered from 8,800 people over 50 years of age. The study was looking for links between the likelihood of stroke or heart attack, and the condition of the brain. Four years after the initial data was collected, participants were examined again, and given brain tests, such as naming as many animals as they could in a minute’s time, or learning new words. The same tests were administered again eight years later.

Not only did participants with high-risk physical conditions such as obesity or high blood pressure fair poorly in the cognitive tests, but those who smoked had a “consistent association” with lower scores as well.

"We have identified a number of risk factors which could be associated with accelerated cognitive decline, all of which, could be modifiable," said Dr. Alex Dregan, one of the researchers involved. "We need to make people aware of the need to do some lifestyle changes because of the risk of cognitive decline."

LINKS
BBC story
Heavy smoking and dementia

Your rating: None Average: 3.3 (6 votes)

Your Comments, Thoughts, Questions, Ideas

claire bouis's picture
claire bouis says:

Yet another reason to quit today!

posted on Wed, 01/16/2013 - 4:22pm
Ashlynn 's picture
Ashlynn says:

my papa smokes and he has cancer. He had a hard timne breathing and he hacks all the time.people need to stop smoking. I wish i could help. so, PEOPLE STOP SMOKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

posted on Sat, 04/13/2013 - 2:42pm
amazing kristin  's picture
amazing kristin says:

U should really stop smoking my aunt and uncle smoke to but they use esigs. I wish i could help. so PEOPLE STOP SMOKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-) (-:

posted on Sun, 04/21/2013 - 3:38pm
Lisa Humpback's picture
Lisa Humpback says:

Smoking really is a HORIBBLE and not wise thing to do. You won`t get nearly much time to live if you smoke because smoking blackens your lungs and you could lose your voice, or have cancer, or something you would not like to have. You could lose half of your lifetime.

posted on Wed, 05/15/2013 - 2:43pm

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <h3> <h4> <em> <i> <strong> <b> <span> <ul> <ol> <li> <blockquote> <object> <embed> <param> <sub> <sup>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You may embed videos from the following providers vimeo, youtube. Just add the video URL to your textarea in the place where you would like the video to appear, i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw0jmvdh.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Images can be added to this post.

More information about formatting options