A new study shows that alcohol dependant individuals who also smoke are at a higher risk of early ageing of their brains than alcohol dependant individuals who don't smoke.
Previous studies have proved that when alcoholics seek medical help, the treatment works best when the addict understands and incorporates the interventions provided in the clinic. A study, which is the first of its kind, looked to see the effect of an individual's smoking status and age on neurocognition in treatment-seeking alcoholics.
They found that alcohol-dependant individuals who also smoke are at a higher risk of early ageing of their brains than alcohol dependant individuals who don't smoke. They were found to have problems with remembering things and it also hampered their ability to think quickly.
"Several factors -- nutrition, exercise, comorbid medical conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, psychiatric conditions such as depressive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, and genetic predispositions -- may also influence cognitive functioning during early abstinence," explained Timothy C. Durazzo, assistant professor in the department of radiology and biomedical imaging at the University of California San Francisco, and corresponding author for the study. "We focused on the effects of chronic cigarette smoking and increasing age on cognition because previous research suggested that each has independent, adverse affects on multiple aspects of cognition and brain biology in people with and without alcohol use disorders. This previous research also indicated that the adverse effects of smoking on the brain accumulate over time. Therefore, we predicted that AD, active chronic smokers would show the greatest decline in cognitive abilities with increasing age."
For the study, researchers analyzed the neurocognitive functioning of four groups of participants. All participants were aged between 26 and 71 years. The first group included people who never smoked and were all healthy. The second group included alcohol dependant participants who had never smoked in their lives. The third group included dependant participants that were former smokers and the fourth group included alcohol dependant participants who were also active smokers. Researchers evaluated all their cognitive abilities.
"We found that, at one month of abstinence, actively smoking AD [individuals] had greater-than-normal age effects on measures of learning, memory, processing speed, reasoning and problem-solving, and fine motor skills," said Durazzo. "AD never-smokers and former-smokers showed equivalent changes on all measures with increasing age as the never-smoking controls. These results indicate the combination of alcohol dependence and active chronic smoking was related to an abnormal decline in multiple cognitive functions with increasing age."
The findings of this study will be published in the October 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
