Smoking Shrinks Your Brain

A long-term study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, conducted by researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University and the University of Edinburgh, reports that tobacco use is linked to a distinct thinning of the frontal cortex. The researchers examined 504 elderly subjects who had previously been examined in the wide-scale Scottish Mental Survey of 1947. Those who had once smoked tobacco, and who still used it, were found to have a notable shrinkage in the cortex — a section of the brain tasked with memory, language and perception. This process naturally occurs with age, but was found to be greatly accelerated in smokers. The author stated, “We found that current and ex-smokers had, at age 73, many areas of thinner brain cortex than those that never smoked. Subjects who stopped smoking seem to partially recover their cortical thickness for each year without smoking. However, it took [approximately] 25 years for complete cortical recovery in affected areas for those at the mean pack-years value in this sample. As the cortex thins with normal aging, our data suggest that smoking is associated with diffuse accelerated cortical thinning, a biomarker of cognitive decline in adults. Although partial recovery appears possible, it can be a long process.” To learn more about this study, click here.