Active Cigarette Smoking Is Associated With Increased Age-Related Decline on Measures of Visuospatial Learning and...

The goal of this study was to determine if active cigarette smoking in Veterans with alcohol use disorder (AUD) was associated with greater age-related neurocognitive decline.

Veterans with AUD, in residential treatment (n = 125; 47 ± 14 years of age, min = 24, max = 76, 29 ± 26 days of abstinence), completed measures of executive functions, learning and memory, processing speed and working memory. Actively smoking AUD (AsAUD, n = 47) were active daily cigarette smokers; former smoking AUD (FsAUD, n = 45) were predominately daily smokers prior to study but did not smoke at the time of study; non-smoking AUD (NsAUD, n = 33) never used cigarettes or smoked 'only a few times' during lifetime.

AsAUD demonstrated greater age-related decline on measures of visuospatial learning and memory, and response inhibition/cognitive flexibility, primarily relative to NsAUD; there were no age-related differences between FsAUD and NsAUD on any measure. There were few significant mean differences between groups across the 15 neurocognitive measures. In AsAUD, higher scores on indices of smoking severity were associated with poorer performance on measures of auditory-verbal learning and memory, response inhibition, set-shifting and working memory. In FsAUD, longer smoking cessation duration was related to lower PTSD, anxiety and depressive symptomatology.

Active smoking was associated with accelerated age-related decline on cognitive functions implicated in response to common evidence-based AUD interventions. Results suggest that smoking history contributes to the considerable heterogeneity observed in neurocognitive function in early AUD recovery, and reinforce the clinical movement to offer smoking cessation resources concurrent with treatment for AUD.