Question: Is it possible that there is a link between smoking tobacco and getting dementia or brain damage?

Nadine Mirza answered on 15 Nov 2018:

This is an excellent and important question Tom- smoking absolutely correlates with dementia and brain damage!
Firstly, let’s talk standard brain damage. It’s been recently found that there are certain chemicals in tobacco that trigger the white blood cells in our brain to start attack healthy cells which over time can result in severe brain damage.
When we’re talking about dementia, smoking tobacco can cause issues in several different ways. Smoking increases risk for strokes and smaller bleeds in the brain which ups the risk for dementia. Smoking also causes blood and heart related issues, which inherently result in blocking blood vessels. This prevents blood, and the oxygen within blood, from reaching the brain, which can cause a specific type of dementia called vascular dementia. Studies have also shown a bit of a correlation with tobacco smoking and Alzheimer’s Disease.