Here is another reason to stop smoking and cut back on the drinking and fatty foods, reports recently released by the American Academy of Neurology have linked heavy smoking, heavy drinking, and high cholesterol with Alzheimer’s disease.
What is heavy? Heavy smoking means smoking more than one pack per day. Heavy drinking means having more than two drinks per day. People who drank and/or smoked heavily in their 40s showed signs of Alzheimer’s and dementia years earlier than those who did not smoke or drink heavily.
Scientists now think that Alzheimer’s disease starts to build up inside a person’s brain many years before a person begins to have symptoms of the disease. This could be why people who stay healthy and stay mentally active are less likely to develop the disease.
It is already known that smoking and drinking have adverse effects on the brain. These activities damage brain cells and the synapses that connect the cells together. Explaining the connection between Alzheimer’s and high cholesterol is a little bit harder.
Studies done by the American Academy of Neurology showed that people whose cholesterol levels were between 249 and 500 were 1.5 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than people whose cholesterol levels were below 198. There are theories about whether or not the clogging of a person’s arteries by cholesterol is a cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Right now, the Academy is treating the high cholesterol levels as a predictor of whether or not a person is likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
The basic idea of the studies is this, what is bad for your heart is also bad for your brain. If something has adverse effects on your cardiovascular system, ask yourself how it will affect the central nervous system. The brain and the heart are intricately linked. It’s natural that what affects one will affect the other.
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