2nd hand smoke kills brain cells

If you smoke, and you really don’t want to quit, or perhaps you want to quit but simply haven’t found enough reason to, here’s a piece of news that might persuade you: the more you smoke, the more you’re harming and perhaps even killing the people around you, especially the most vulnerable, newborns, infants, and young children.

Although there is still some controversy and debate about this – hey, there’s controversy and debate about everything including in this world the holiness of Don Cherry – but for me, the evidence is pretty plain on this one, if you just want to see the evidence, of course: 2^nd hand smoke harms, maims, kills everyone forced to take it in regularly.

As yet another piece of proof of that contention, a study published in the BMJ online conducted on 5000 non-smoking adults in the UK concluded that those people who were regularly exposed to 2^nd hand smoke (based on saliva samples of a chemical that is directly produced only by the breakdown of nicotine) had a 44 % higher risk of being diagnosed with dementia than non-smokers who had not been subjected to inhaling much 2^nd hand smoke.

Now, there might be other explanations for that link between dementia and nicotine exposure, such as the possibility that com[pared to people do not suck in someone else’s smoke on a regular basis, those people who do get regular exposure to 2^nd hand smoke might also be much more likely to have other unhealthy habits that raise the risk of dementia or they might also be subjected to other still-undiscovered brain-killing effects besides the toxic cigarette smoke effects.

That’s pretty unlikely, though, and in this business, most of the time the simple explanation works best: if you get exposed to 2^nd hand smoke regularly, you are losing brain cells much faster than you otherwise would.