Category Archives: smoking

A study published online in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that middle-age men who smoke aged their brains by 10 years. Intriguingly, smoking did not seem to have the same cognitive effects on women.

As reported in Medpagetoday:

“Current smoking conferred the equivalent of 10 years of aging on global cognition and executive function among men, Séverine Sabia, PhD, of University College London, and colleagues reported online in the

This effect might be expected to lead to dementia later in life, they noted.

Although their analysis of the Whitehall II cohort study of British civil servants couldn’t address that risk, other evidence from studies in the elderly has increasingly linked smoking and dementia.

Because the process that leads to dementia appears to start decades before clinical diagnosis, smoking cessation efforts need to target individuals at all ages, Sabia’s group concluded.

Smoking didn’t appear to have the same impact on women’s brains, perhaps because the women studied in the Whitehall II cohort didn’t smoke as heavily as the men, the researchers suggested.”