Smoking in midlife may impair memory
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Middle-aged adults who smoke appear to have a higher than average risk of developing memory impairments, according to a report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
“With the aging population and the projected increases in older adults with dementia, it is important to identify modifiable risk factors,” lead author Dr. Severine Sabia told Reuters Health. “Our results suggest that smoking had an adverse effect on cognitive function in midlife. However, 10 years after smoking cessation, there is little adverse effect of smoking on cognition. Thus, public health messages should target smokers at all ages.”
In fact, long-term ex-smokers were less likely to have deficits in memory, vocabulary, and verbal fluency than those who never smoked. This “could be explained by improvement in other health behaviors among those giving up smoking in midlife,” said Sabia, a researcher with the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in Villejuif, France.
The new findings come from an analysis of data from 10,308 subjects who participated in the Whitehall II study, a long-term, London-based study of male and female civil servants. The subjects were between 35 and 55 years of age at study enrollment (1985-1988) and smoking history was evaluated then and between 1997 and 1999. Cognitive test data were available for 5388 subjects by 1999.
Compared with those who never smoked, smokers at study entry were more likely to die during follow-up and to not participate in cognitive testing, the report shows.
Current smokers were 37 percent more likely than never smokers to have the lowest memory performance by 1999. At study entry, ex-smokers were 30 percent less likely than never smokers to have a poor vocabulary and low verbal fluency. Moreover, improvements in other health behaviors were noted among subjects who stopped smoking during follow-up, the researchers found.
However, the data supporting the link between smoking history and cognitive decline were inconsistent, the report shows.
The relationship between past or current smoking and cognitive decline “needs to be replicated,” Sabia said. “New cognitive tests are currently being assessed in the Whitehall II study (a third wave),” she noted, and this should help determine “if the association between smoking and cognitive function is increasing with age and whether other parts of cognitive function are affected with aging.”
SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, June 9, 2008.
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