Health part 3 - listen

Listen and fill in the gaps.

Other …1…… has linked smoking to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.  ALS is a ……2…. disease affecting the motor …3…… and the voluntary muscles.  Last year, a study in the medical journal Neurology found smoking to be an established risk …4……. in developing the disease.  Some of the …5…. even suggested smoking may be directly ……6……. for ALS.

Smoking also increases the risk of developing age-related macular degeneration.  AMD is the leading cause of ……7….. among adults fifty and older.  Research has shown AMD is two to three times more common among smokers than other people.

A recent study examined how smoking ……8…… a persons risk of AMD later in life.  Researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles studied nearly two thousand women.

Four percent of the women were smokers.  Each woman had pictures of her retinas taken at age seventy-eight.  The researchers …9…… these retinal images with pictures taken five years later when the women were eighty-three.  They studied the pictures for ……10…. of AMD and to see whether smoking influenced the womens …11….. of developing the disease.

Factor, nerves, blindness,  research, deadly, chances, evidence, responsible, affects, compared, signs