Smoking Shrinks the Brain, Quitting Expands it

A recent study conducted by researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University and the University of Edinburgh recently revealed that smoking changes the brain structure of current smokers by thinning the brain's cortex, making it smaller than its normal size.

New York Daily said that this area is involved in the storage of memory, language and perception. Further, if the cortex shrinks, cognitive abilities might also start to decline.

"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" Dr. Sherif Karama, an assistant professor of psychiatry at McGill and an affiliate of the Montreal Neurological Institute said in an interview.

Here is the glimmer of the hope for smokers. The researchers found out that quitting smoking has a positive effect in restoring a part of the cortex thickness, according to Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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," the researchers wrote.

Meanwhile, Mirror said that the researchers also considered other factors that may cause the thinning of the brain's cortex. It has been said in the study that people with lower IQ have higher chances to have a thinner cortex.

The study entitled "Cigarette smoking and thinning of the brain's cortex" now appears in the Molecular Psychiatry. It involved 244 male and 260 female subjects. Their average age was 73 when the study was conducted.