2023-06-08 06:17:24
A study found that smoking cigarettes can cause a person to experience cognitive decline in their fourth decade of life.
A study of 136,018 participants over the age of 45 by a team at Ohio State University (OSU) found that 10 percent of smokers in middle age or older began to experience memory loss and confusion. In general, smokers were twice as likely to develop brain problems as their peers.
Ex-smokers who stopped smoking more than ten years ago had a 50% increased risk of developing brain problems.
Cognitive problems are rare in middle-aged people, as the brain does not begin to lose function until after the age of 65 in most cases. Smoking has been linked to many important health problems later in life, such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, among others. Women are also more likely to suffer from cognitive decline than men.
Smoking has long been associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline such as Alzheimer’s disease, but symptoms of these problems in middle-aged people are rare.
For their research, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, the researchers surveyed a sample of nearly 140,000 people about their smoking habits and whether they felt they had experienced memory loss during that time.
They found that 8% of people who had never smoked experienced cognitive decline.
Meanwhile, 16% of current smokers reported brain problems and memory loss. Many of these smokers were too young to deal with these problems.
Just under 10% of participants between the ages of 45 and 49 reported brain problems when surveyed – and almost all of these were smokers, the researchers noted.
The rate of reported cognitive problems was similar among respondents in their 50s.
The differences in cognitive decline between smokers and non-smokers diminished greatly with age, although many people at that point develop diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia for a variety of reasons.
“The association we saw was most significant in the 45-59 age group, suggesting that quitting smoking at this point in life may be beneficial for cognitive health,” said study senior author and professor of epidemiology at Ohio State University, Dr. Jeffrey Wing.
Although quitting smoking can reverse some of the damage, about 12% of respondents who quit smoking more than a decade ago reported cognitive problems.
People who had quit smoking within the past 10 years had a 13% risk of developing the condition, slightly higher than those who had quit smoking for a long time.
The study only took examples of self-reported cognitive problems, and did not collect any data on clinical diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
Signs of the devastating condition often begin decades before a patient is in a position to receive a diagnosis, and it is rare for a doctor to tell a middle-aged person that they have the condition.
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