09-29-2005, 12:49 PM
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Re: Smoking seems to increase brain damage in alcoholics
Tom wrote:
> Alcoholics who smoke appear to lose more brain mass than alcoholics
> who don't smoke, according to a study at the San Francisco VA Medical
> Center.
>
> It is already well-known that the brains of long-term alcoholics
> atrophy and shrink, the study authors say, but the new findings are
> the first evidence that cigarette smoking might contribute to that
> atrophy, particularly in grey matter of the parietal and temporal
> lobes.
>
> Fifty to 90 percent of alcoholics also are smokers, according to
> Dieter Meyerhoff, PhD, a radiology researcher at SFVAMC and the
> principal investigator of the study
>
> "Just looking at the amount of tissue mass lost due to either drinking
> or smoking, alcoholics who smoke show a greater loss in some regions
> of the brain compared to alcoholics who don't smoke," says Meyerhoff,
> who also is a professor of radiology at the University of California,
> San Francisco.
>
> The study, which was published in the August 2005 issue of Alcoholism:
> Clinical and Experimental Research, compared 37 recovering alcoholics
> between the ages of 26 and 66 with a control group of 30 healthy light
> drinkers. The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging, a safe,
> non-invasive imaging technique, to measure brain volumes of the study
> participants.
>
> They discovered that the more severe the tobacco habit, the greater
> the brain injury. "In smoking alcohol-dependent individuals, smaller
> regional [brain] volumes are related to greater cigarette-smoking
> severity," according to the study findings, with severity measured by
> level of nicotine dependence, cigarettes smoked per day, and years of
> smoking.
>
>
> More -
> http://anxpangazette.blog-city.com/
>
> http://anxpangazette.blog-city.com/s...coholi cs.htm
who cares?
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