A recent Australian study comparing the performance of elders (over 68) who smoked, with elders who quit… found a connection between the mental performance measures and brain scans done on all participants, and a connection between smoking and mental decline, and its opposite.
The study was
carried out over 2 years, repeating at 6 month intervals. It was the first of
its kind to track such cognitive long term changes connected with specific
behaviors.. Results showed that the elderly smokers lost an inordinate amount
of brain cells specialized for higher level thinking and memory.
Osvaldo Almeida,
professor of geriatric psychiatry at the University of Western Australia,
remarked that this is the first time brain scans have been positively
correlated to actual drops in performance tests.
QUITTING
SLOWS COGNITIVE DECLINE
The smokers who
failed to quit slid into mental decline twice as fast as non-smokers, but
“those who quit don’t decline faster than those who never smoked”, said
Professor Almeida, a consultant at the Royal Perth Hospital where the patients
were recruited.
“It’s a good thing for your brain to quit,” he said. ”People who stop smoking, in terms of memory and cognitive function, do as well as people who never smoked.” He believes that quitting slows cognitive decline and I also felt that in my own quitting experience even though I was a young middle-age.
While the folks
who quit revealed gray matter loss up to eighteen months after giving up,
Professor Almeida said the damage was not significant and not in brain regions
significant to cognitive impairment.
He went on to
assert that quitters at any age can and will benefit cognitively. Elderly
smoking is positively associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s, but even these
people will see their decline slowed down if they quit smoking.
Professor Almeida states that he intends to follow up the test subjects at five year internals, continuing to chronicle their changes.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21281718
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/smoking-harms-mental-health-but-quitters-arrest-decline-study-finds-20110209-1an22.html#ixzz3gkFuxoun
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