14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past few years, a large number of scientific studies on the possible correlations between Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and smoking have been published. These researches have now been reviewed by a team of experts from the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF), who have been able to conclude that smoking cigarettes is not only a factor that dictates a person's chances of developing AD later on in life, but also one of the most important triggers associated with the neurodegenerative condition.
The new research took into account a large number of control factors about the target studies, including the quality of the journals in which the works appeared, the design employed, when the papers were published, and the connections that existed between their authors and the tobacco industry. As you can imagine, the UCSF team found that industry-affiliated studies proposed that smoking actually protected against the development of AD. All independent studies have confirmed that cigarettes and tobacco actually increase Alzheimer's risk. Details of the work appear in the January issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
“For many years, published studies and popular media have perpetuated the myth that smoking is protective against the development of AD. The disease's impact on quality of life and health care costs continues to rise. It is therefore critical that we better understand its causes, in particular, the role of cigarette smoking,” the lead author of the journal entry, UCSF School of Nursing Assistant Professor Janine K. Cataldo, PhD, RN, says. At this point, official statistics show that more than 5.3 million Americans are struggling with the condition. But the bad news is that the incidence of cases is set to increase, as the baby-boom generation matures.
The survey dealt with 43 studies on AD, all published between 1984 and 2007. Of these studies, about 25 percent had authors that were tied to the tobacco industry. “We know that industry-sponsored research is more likely to reach conclusions favorable to the sponsor. Our findings point to the ongoing corrosive nature of tobacco industry funding and point to the need for academic institutions to decline tobacco industry funding to protect the research process,” UCSF Department of Medicine expert Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, who has also been a coauthor of the new paper, adds.