Pubdate: Sunday, 11 October, 1998 Source: Seattle Times (WA) Contact: (c) 1998 The Seattle Times Company Website: http://www.seattletimes.com/ Author: Seattle Times News Services 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