Image provider Getty/Futurism
Smoking cigarettes not only has great potential to give you cancer and lung diseasebut it also apparently shrinks your poor brain and can lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
A team of researchers from Missouri and North Carolina wanted to find out whether smoking causes a decrease in brain volume, or whether genetic factors (predisposition to smoking habits or naturally small brains) lead to smoking habits. They looked at data from more than 32,000 Europeans. .
“There is a known association between smoking behavior and reductions in total brain volume and gray and white matter volumes,” the researchers wrote. “However, significant questions remain as to whether these associations represent a predisposition to risk of developing smoking or are a consequence of smoking.”
Specifically, we looked at data on health behaviors, brain scans, and genetic risk factors. These are all UK Biobank, They then performed a statistical analysis to see if daily smoking led to a decrease in brain volume over time.
According to the study, after crunching the numbers, researchers found that daily smoking does not lead to a smaller brain, but rather the opposite, and that the more you smoke, the greater the loss of brain material. He is now convinced of this. Surprisingly, the more years a person smokes, the more brain volume is irreversibly lost.
As you get older, you already become like this. Brain volume decreases over timeHowever, smoking large amounts of cigarettes shrinks the brain, accelerates aging, and increases the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Alarmingly, researchers estimate that “14 percent of Alzheimer’s disease cases worldwide can be attributable to smoking.”
Although this damage can’t be reversed, researchers say you can at least stop the process by quitting your smoking habit.
“We can’t undo the damage that’s already been done, but we can avoid causing further damage,” said Yun-Fu Zhang, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “Smoking is a modifiable risk factor. There is one thing you can change to prevent brain aging and increased risk of dementia: Quit smoking.”
More information about tobacco: Cigarette smoking appears to cause mental illness, scientists say, but there’s a catch