November 29, 2011   Smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke kill some 443,000 people every year in the U.S. In addition, for every smoking-related death there are 20 people living with a smoking-related disease, the CDC reports. If cancer, heart attacks or strokes do not motivate you enough to quit smoking, how about the risk of Alzheimer’s disease? New research by Kaiser Permanente in California and the University of Eastern Finland has established a firm link between smoking and the onset of dementia in your senior years. Middle aged men and women who were at least 50 years old at the start of the study were followed for 20 years. The results: one in four study participants were diagnosed with dementia. A quarter of these people were found to have Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. But vascular dementia, where the brain is impaired by damage to the blood vessels, was responsible for several hundred more of the diagnoses in the study.

For More Information: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/lifecycles/2011/nov/28/forget-cigarette-smoking-it-could-cause-you-lose-y/