Smoking Increases Brain Damage in Alcoholics [Study]

Researchers at San Francisco VA Medical Center have shown that alcoholics who smoke appear to lose more brain mass than alcoholics who don’t, says a study published in the latest issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

It is already well-known that the brains of long-term alcoholics atrophy and shrink, but this is the first study to suggest that cigarette smoking might contribute to that atrophy, particularly in grey matter of the parietal and temporal lobes. Fifty to 90 percent of alcoholics also are smokers, according to Dr. Dieter Meyerhoff, a radiology researcher at SFVAMC and the principal investigator of the study.

“Just looking at the amount of tissue mass lost due to either drinking or smoking, alcoholics who smoke show a greater loss in some regions of the brain compared to alcoholics who don’t smoke,” Meyerhoff said.

The study compared 37 recovering alcoholics between the ages of 26 and 66 with a control group of 30 healthy light drinkers. The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging, a safe, non-invasive imaging technique, to measure brain volumes of the study participants. They found that the more severe the tobacco habit, the greater the brain injury.

In smoking alcohol-dependent individuals, smaller regional [brain] volumes are related to greater cigarette-smoking severity, say the researchers.

The alcoholics (24 smokers and 13 non-smokers) averaged around 400 drinks per month for three years prior to the study; the light drinkers (seven smokers and 23 non-smokers) averaged between four and 11 drinks per month before the study and had no history of alcohol abuse or dependence. The alcoholics were sober for approximately one week before the study began. The study uncovered no apparent differences in brain volume between smoking and non-smoking light drinkers. Another key finding was that among non-smoking alcoholics, there was a direct relationship between brain volume and cognitive function: the higher the volume, the better the function. However, no such relationship was apparent among smoking alcoholics.

In the future, the researchers plan a prospective study that will use MRI to compare brain volumes between smoking and non-smoking light drinkers and smoking and non-smoking alcoholics, with the hope of replicating the results of their current retrospective study.