If you’ve ever smoked – or lived with a smoker – you may be familiar with the breathlessness and early morning cough that come with the habit. The impact on the lungs is obvious – a smoker directly inhales a poison, after all. But smoking’s damaging effect on the brain may be less apparent.
A new study throws this into the spotlight: habitual smoking causes the brain to shrink, it suggests. Dr Laura Bierut, a psychiatry professor at Washington University School of Medicine in the US state of Missouri, led the study. She admits scientists once paid less attention to the effects of smoking on the brain, “in part because we were focused on all the terrible effects of smoking on the lungs and the heart”.
A Swedish study on smoking and the brain examined the brains and smoking habits of women over more than 30 years. It found that cigarette smoking was associated with shrinkage in the frontal lobe. Dr Joshua Gray, associate professor in the departments of medical and clinical psychology, and of neuroscience at the Uniformed Services University in Washington, led a large 2020 study on the effects of smoking on the brain.
The results, he says, suggest that smoking is one of the top risk factors for dementia, associated with a 1.6 times greater likelihood of developing the disease. “It exerts numerous damaging effects through oxidative stress,” he says.
Inflammation, and atherosclerotic processes such as hardening of the arteries, can translate into brain atrophy, w.
