Question: does smoking kill brain cells

Sandra Greive answered on 6 Mar 2017:

I had no idea that smoking kills brain cells, till you asked this question and I looked it up using google scholar. What I did know was tobacco smoke contains a lot of carcinogens that cause a lot of damage to the DNA in your cells (usually in the lung cells where the smoke ends up). Each time this damage happens there is a chance that it won’t be repaired properly and cause cancer. The longer you smoke, the more chances there are for cancer causing DNA damage to happen.

I learn something new everyday! Thanks to your question and a review article in an international neruophysiology journal talking about this exact question, I just learned that tobacco smoke also contains a lot of chemicals that are toxic to the brain. Such as heavy metals that can cause oxidative stress on your cells which can kill or damage them, or other chemicals in smoke that can raise your blood pressure which increases your chances of having small strokes which kill brain cells through lack of oxygen. All of these things are bad for your brain and will cause problems with basic thinking function. Longterm these things could lead to alzheimer’s disease, dementia, stroke and decreases in the size of the brain.