Female Brain Cells Inhale

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Let’s start on the same page.

  • Female SmokingThis blog post is about a suggested direct link between smoking and brain damage
  • Everyone has the right to their own decision whether to smoke or not
  • The following is intended to provide you with the latest information on how your brain cells respond to potentially harmful agents found in tobacco

The effects of smoking are not known to differentiate between male and female brains, but the tobacco industry does.

Tobacco advertising is targeting young women worldwide as a new lucrative market ideal for exploitation.  Developing countries are prime markets as the male smoking rate of 40% is declining and new glossy packaging and flavored cigarettes are being pitched to women.

Survey results from The World Health Organization and its partners

  • project female smokers will double by 2025
  • show the gap between boys at 12% and girls at 7% is narrowing
  • indicate that the girl to boy ratio for smoking is almost equal in 151 countries surveyed

The female brain, however, is affected the same way regardless of which country it finds itself located in.

The most dire warning about smoking focuses on nicotine addiction, especially since nicotine reaches your brain cells within 10 seconds of your first puff.

But, there are other chemicals as well in that pleasurable looking cigarette that “provoke white blood cells in the central nervous system to attack healthy cells” according to Debapyiya Ghosh and Dr. Anirban Basu of the Indian National Brain Research Center.

Imagine your healthy brain cells inhaling a chemical know as NNK found in any tobacco product that leads to neuroinflammatory brain damage.

Microglia are special cells that are the first line of immune defense in the brain and spinal cord. They provide protection from invading infectious agents by acting quickly to decrease inflammation.

Ghosh and Basu’s research was reported in the Journal of Neurochemistry as a suggestive direct link between smoking and brain damage. NNK acts to provoke microglia cells into attacking healthy cells over the infectious invaders.  Subsequently the brain’s nerve cells become inflamed and damaged.

The consequences of NKK exposure for neuroimflammatory diseases, like multiple sclerosis is considerable, especially since brain cells inhale NNK directly from the cigarette and equally as well from second hand smoke, warns Ghosh.

Just know that tobacco companies want you to associate smoking with “… independence, emancipation, sex appeal, slimness, glamour and beauty, …” [Johanna Birckmayer, director international research Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids].

You however have a choice to be independent, emancipated, sexy, slim, glamorous and beautiful and have microglia cells that keep the rest of your brain cells healthy rather than destroying them.

I just thought you might want to know this.

by Joyce Hansen

[Source: ScienceDaily, June 23, 2009 Smoking Linked To Brain Damage]