MIAMI.- It has long been known that the tobacco consumption It is one of the main causes of various respiratory conditions, deaths from lung cancer and cardiovascular diseases.
This habit, which has also been linked to the risk of developing depression due to its association with mental illness, continues to be the main cause of preventable illnesses and deaths in children. USA.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 480,000 people die in the country each year from tobacco use.
However, recent research conducted by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, USA has observed the effects of smoking on the brain.
Loss of brain volume
The study published in ‘Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science revealed that smoking not only affects organs such as the heart and lungs, scientists have determined that smoking also causes a gradual loss of brain volume.
The researchers indicated that as they began to look at the brain more closely, it became clear that smoking is also very bad for the brain. “It is known that smoking and a smaller brain volume are related, but they have never been sure why,” the specialists indicated.
For her part, the study’s lead author, Laura Bierut, professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, noted in a press release that “a reduction in brain volume is consistent with greater aging. This is important as our population ages, because Both aging and smoking are risk factors for dementia”.
It is also a risk factor for dementia
Likewise, the study helps explain the results of other studies that have found the high risk that smokers have of suffering from Age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 14% of annual cases of dementia worldwide could be attributed to smoking.
“People who smoke are more likely to suffer from deterioration of gray and white matter,” they said.
“Until recently, scientists have overlooked the effects of smoking on the brain, in part because we focused on all the terrible effects of smoking on the lungs and heart,” Bierut said.
Role of genetics
Different studies have established genetics as a factor to consider in the risk of a person smokinghighlighting in turn that brain size and smoking are hereditary.
To obtain the relationship between brain volume, smoking and genetic risk, Bierut’s team examined brain scan data from more than 32,000 people drawn from the UK Biobank, a publicly available biomedical database containing genetic information, from health and behavior of half a million people.
The findings showed that a person’s genetic predisposition leads to smokingan action that ultimately leads to a decreased brain volume.
They also found that the association between smoking and brain volume depended on the dose; the more packs a person smoked per day, the smaller their brain volume.
Each pair of factors was shown to be related:
- Smoking history and brain volume
- Genetic risk of smoking and smoking history
- Genetic risk of smoking and brain volume
The brains of people who had quit smoking years earlier remained significantly smaller than those of people who never smoked, the data show. There was no evidence of an increase in brain volume after quitting smoking.
Taken together, these results provide additional evidence that a history of daily smoking is strongly associated with long-term global adverse consequences in the brain.
According to experts, Quitting smoking prevents further loss of brain tissue, but does not return the brain to its original sizesince people’s brains naturally lose volume with age, so smoking causes the brain to age prematurely.
They concluded that You cannot undo damage that has already been done, but you can avoid causing more damage.. “Smoking is a modifiable risk factor. “There is one thing you can change to stop aging your brain and putting yourself at greater risk for dementia, and that is to stop smoking,” they emphasized.
@Lydr05
Source: With information from ‘Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science
