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Smoking Can Triple Risk of Alzheimer's

Smoking Can Triple Risk of Alzheimer's Daily Mail; London (UK) - May 06, 2004 Heavy smokers can run three times the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, say scientists. The more people smoke, the higher the risk, according to researchers who have completed a major two-year study. Their findings directly contradict earlier reports that nicotine in cigarettes might actually protect the brain. In the latest study researchers from Daping Hospital in the province of Chongqing, China, tracked 3,000 volunteers aged 60 and over to determine the risks of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The results, published in the European Journal of Neurology, showed smokers are 2.7 times more at risk of the brain disorder than non- smokers. Heavy smokers run a three times higher risk than light smokers. ’Our study suggests smoking status and the amount people smoke are both associated with dementia,’ said the Daping scientists. Amanda Sandford, research manager for the campaign group Action on Smoking and Health, said there is increasing evidence of a link between tobacco and Alzheimer’s. ’We know that one way smoke works on the body is to deprive the brain of oxygen,’ she said. ’If that happens, it can have an effect on brain function.’ Smokers are under the delusion that nicotine helps their mental performance, she added. ’It’s the component that smokers say assists their performance in mental tests compared with non- smokers because it is a stimulant. ’If you take away the nicotine the performance falls back but only in the short term. In the long term it doesn’t improve at all.’ Miss Sandford added that previous studies have been hampered by the fact that smokers tend to die earlier of heart disease and cancer. ’Older people who develop dementia are more likely to be nonsmokers simply because they have lived long enough to develop the disease and this has distorted the results.’ A team at Scripps Research Institute in California last year found a by-product of nicotine called nornicotine which they said appeared to help protect brain cells. But Miss Sandford said: ’This new study from China looks at a big population and does appear to suggest that smoking is not protective and may contribute to the dementia process.’ It also links the rising scales of nicotine addiction with an increase in the number of Alzheimer sufferers. ’This should end the myth that you can smoke and somehow it will preserve your brain,’ said Miss Sandford. Alzheimer’s affects almost one in 10 people over 65 some 700,000 people in the UK with about 500 new cases diagnosed every day as more people live longer. Victims include novelist Iris Murdoch, who died four years ago at the age of 79, and former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. For some sufferers new drugs can delay the progress of devastating symptoms such as memory loss but there is no cure.

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