Middle-aged adults who smoke tended to perform poorly on tests of memory and reasoning compared to nonsmokers, adding to the list of reasons not to smoke, French researchers said on Monday.
 
    Middle-aged adults who smoke tended to perform poorly on tests of memory and reasoning compared to nonsmokers, adding to the list of reasons not to smoke, French researchers said on Monday.

    Analyzing previously collected data on about 5,000 British civil servants, the researchers found those who smoked were more likely than people who never smoked to be in the lowest-performing of five groups in tests of memory, reasoning, vocabulary and verbal fluency.

    Smoking was associated with mental decline in middle age, as it is with dementia and a host of physical ills later in life, they found.

    "Smoking in middle age is associated with memory deficit and decline in reasoning abilities," concluded Severine Sabia and colleagues from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Villejuif, France.

    Compared to smokers, people who said they had quit cigarettes were more likely to adopt healthier behaviors, such as drinking less alcohol, being more physically active, and eating more fruits and vegetables, Sabia reported in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

    The participants were aged 35 to 55 at the beginning of the study, which followed some subjects up to 17 years.

    The study also demonstrated how difficult it can be to conduct long-term research on smokers: more than twice as many smokers as non-smokers refused to take the memory test again or were not able to be re-tested, in some cases because they died in the interim.

    法國研究人員于本周一稱，與不吸煙者相比，中年吸煙者在記憶力和推理測試中的表現較差。這無疑是戒煙的又一個理由。

    研究人員分析了之前收集的英國約五千名公務員的有關數據后發現，與從不吸煙者相比，吸煙者在記憶力、推理、詞匯和口頭表達等幾項測試中表現居五組中最差的幾率更大。

    研究人員發現，吸煙會導致中年人智力水平下降，而且會導致日后老年癡呆及其它很多身體性疾病。

    位于法國維勒瑞夫的全國健康與醫療研究所的瑟弗琳•薩比婭及其同事得出結論：“中年吸煙會導致記憶力減退和推理能力下降。”

    薩比婭在發表于《內科醫學檔案》期刊上的研究報告中稱，與吸煙者相比，稱自己已戒煙的人更易養成更為健康的生活習慣，比如少喝酒、多鍛煉，多吃水果和蔬菜。

    這項研究剛開始時，研究對象的年齡在35歲至55歲之間，研究人員對其中一些人進行了長達17年的跟蹤調查。

    該研究還讓人們了解到對吸煙者進行長期的跟蹤調查有多么困難：拒絕再次接受記憶測試或者無法再次接受測試的吸煙者比不吸煙者多一倍以上，有些是因為研究對象在此期間已去世。

    Vocabulary:  

    interim: an interval of time between one event, process, or period and another（過渡期間：某些事件、過程或階段中時間上的間隔）