Why 66% of smokers get Alzheimer's disease....

Thursday, 7-24-2014

1.  A recent study found that about 66% of smokers get Alzheimer’s disease.

That’s truly astonishing news that even doctors may not yet know! 

Smoking news recently reported by Medical News Today says that smokers are 45% more likely to get dementia. 

So there's a new reason to give people to quit!

Few people who are mentally competent now want to wind up there!

And, given the horrible financial and emotional costs of dementia, it's another public health and economic reason to tax tobacco products heavily; and increase the areas where smoking is not permitted.

It also means developing better ways to quit and making sure more and more smokers use them would be very desirable!

If half of all people over 80 get dementia, a commonly cited estimate, this data show that only 45.87% of nonsmokers do and 66.5% of all smokers do assuming that currently about 20% of Americans smoke.

And, since some of that 80% get second hand smoke exposure, the rate for people who stay completely away from tobacco smoke is even lower -- perhaps lower than 40%.

Doing the things that cut that risk by over 8 to one at that point in addition can cut their risk to less than 5%! (We’ve posted on those often.)

Here’s the relevant quote from Medical News Today & the link to their complete article:

"Smokers have a 45% higher risk of developing dementia than non-smokers, according to information published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI).

Evidence reviewed by WHO reveals a strong link between smoking and the risk of dementia, and the more a person smokes, the higher the risk. It is estimated that 14% of Alzheimer's disease cases worldwide are potentially attributable to smoking."

Smoking increases risk of dementia

http://mnt.to/l/4pq9

Smokers have a 45% higher risk of developing dementia than non-smokers,

according to information published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in

collaboration with Alzheimer's Disease...

2.  Meanwhile many smokers don’t even know or believe that smoking is even harmful!

The majority of smokers have only heard that smoking causes lung cancer and that even most smokers don’t get it. 

So most of them just think they will be in the lucky group and make no effort to quit. 

The odds of course are so dreadfully high they might not be so lucky.  That’s because, if they are heavy smokers, 25% of the time they will get lung cancer.

3.  What doctors do know that most smokers do not is that the really big risk from smoking is heart disease – even MORE than it is from cancer. 

The other problem is that doctors have not got the word out very well yet that every single puff adds to the plaque that will eventually close up the arteries of smokers.

Smoking has a similar effect on your lungs.

That means that no smoker escapes this harm.  None!

Brand new teen smokers and people who “only” smoke three to five cigarettes a day are harmed with every single puff.

Then if they keep smoking, this happens thousands of times after a few years even for these young and light smokers.

4.  How does this make smokers more likely to get Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia?

Because it means the lungs and blood vessels in smokers deliver less oxygen and remove less CO2 and other waste products than in nonsmokers.

Worse, cigarette smoke delivers carbon monoxide instead of Oxygen.  So brain cells and nerves in the brain of smokers sustain more damage and less of it is cleaned up.

Alzheimer’s and other dementias are caused by damage to the brain cells and nerves and by the damage from waste products that build up until they cause damage themselves.

Clearly, cigarette smoke does both.

So, just like eating hydrogenated oils is a way of eating heart attack starter, smoking is a heart attack starter AND a dementia starter too!

5.  But that may only be half the reason smoking causes dementia!

Except for cadmium pollution of food and industrial accidents both of which are now less frequent, the main cause of excess cadmium exposure is smoking.

But besides osteoporosis and other harm, it seems that high cadmium exposure looks to cause Alzheimer’s disease too!

I found the info that excess cadmium exposure causes such damage when I researched the reasons why eating foods that are not organic can be harmful.  One such harm comes from the use of fertilizers that contain too much cadmium in foods that are not organically raised.

I thought I remembered that smoking also causes excess cadmium exposure.  Indeed it does and far more of it!

Here are some of the things I found online:

From www.cadmium.org:

"....One model for human cadmium intake (Van Assche 1998) has estimated that ingestion accounts for 95% of total cadmium intake in a non-smoker. For a smoker, this model estimates that roughly 50% of their cadmium intake arises from cigarettes with the balance due to ingestion and the low levels of cadmium naturally present in ambient air."

& ...."in general, cigarette smoking is a habit which can more than double the average person's daily cadmium intake."

& from http://quitsmoking.about.com/od/chemicalsinsmoke/p/cadmium.htm:

"A single cigarette typically contains 1-2 mcg of cadmium. When burned, cadmium is present at a level of 1,000-3,000 ppb in the smoke. Approximately 40 to 60 percent of the cadmium inhaled from cigarette smoke is able to pass through the lungs and into the body. This means that for each pack of cigarettes smoked, a person can absorb an additional 1-3 mcg of cadmium over what is taken in from other sources in their daily life.

Smokers typically have twice as much cadmium in their bodies as their nonsmoking counterparts."

AND, Wikipedia had this:  "Cadmium exposure can also cause people to lose their sense of smell.  That effect is also a marker for Alzheimer's disease."

So, smoking causes mental decline in several ways all of which work.  And every puff by every smoker causes this damage.  Then, after even a few years of smoking that damage is multiplied thousands of times.

So, besides cancer and heart disease and heart attacks and strokes that smoking causes or triggers, smoking causes mental decline too.

That means that it’s worth a massive, focused, and if needed, repeated attempts, to quit smoking.

And for all of us paying the costs that are generated, helping people quit and making it harder and more expensive to continue smoking is also worth a massive, focused, and repeated effort!