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You Might Be Smoking Up Your Brain

By Suparna Chakaraborthy

Cigarette Smoking
Smoking is injurious to health. We all read it and then smoke the line up, thinking, millions of people smoking can't have cancer but cancer is not the only disease smoking can lead you to. A new study has revealed that lighting a cigarette could predispose people to dementia, a loss of cognitive ability.

The human brain becomes riddled with amyloid protein plaques and tangles of tau proteins in Alzheimer's disease. Low doses of nicotine, have showed reduction in the protein plague.

To reach this conclusion, Dr. Yan-Jiang Wang's team at the Third Military Medical University had done an experiment on rats. He injected amyloid plaques into the brains of one set of healthy rats and gave some the equivalent agent of a smoker's daily dose of nicotine for two weeks while other set received nothing.

The rats injected with nicotine showed early signs of tau tangles, while the others performed better. The conclusion is think before you smoke up. You might be leading your brain to a dangerous disease.

Story first published: Friday, April 16, 2010, 12:34 [IST]
Read more about: cognitive ability brain smoking