VITAL SIGNS: NEWS ABOUT HEALTH AND MEDICINE

Elderly people who smoke may be contributing to the premature loss of
their memory. A study over a two-year period of 9,223 people 65 and
older who did not have dementia found that those who smoked were more
likely to have suffered impairment in short-term memory, time and
place orientation, attention and calculation than people who had never
smoked, said Lenore Launer of Erasmus University Medical School,
Rotterdam, Netherlands. Former smokers were somewhere in between.
"Smoking may damage cerebral functioning by silent small strokes that
are not clinically detected," he reported at the annual meeting of the
American Academy of Neurology.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry