Smoking linked to more rapid MS progression
Smoking cigarettes is known to raise the risk of developing multiple sclerosis, but medical researchers haven't established whether patients who already have the neurological disease do more damage by continuing to smoke.
A study conducted at the Partners MS Center in Boston suggests that smoking accelerates the progression of MS from an illness with occasional symptom-free periods to an unrelenting, worsening condition.
Brian Healy led a team from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard that followed more than 1,400 MS patients for three years, comparing their health based on MRIs and other clinical measures at the beginning and end of the study. The average age of the participants was 42 and they had had MS for about nine years.
Current smokers had more serious disabilities at the beginning of the study and more of them (20 out of 154) began the steady decline of MS than ex-smokers (20 of 237) or never-smokers (32 out of 500), the researchers found. The difference would mesh with other research showing the toxic effects of cigarette smoke on not only the brain and central nervous system, but also on the immune system.
"Although causality remains to be proved, these findings suggest that patients with MS who quit smoking may not only reduce their risk of smoking-related diseases but also delay the progression of MS," the authors write in the Archives of Neurology.
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Elizabeth Cooney is a former
health reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, where she also was a
business reporter and an editor. Earlier in her career, she edited medical
books and journals at Little, Brown, and worked for Boston magazine.Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
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My mother did not smoke beyond youthful dabbling, but had a relentless, unremitting deterioration with MS that began years after quitting that bit of smoking, finally dying at 47 after several final years of basically total paralysis and being tubally fed, crumpled up in a bed, unable to blink "yes" or "no" in response to questions...so who the heck knows. There seems to be some wild variation in the course of MS. I just know I'd rather die of many other things than what took her, so it'd be worth while to avoid anything linked to a rapid progression.