People who quit smoking may reduce or halt the thinning of the brain’s cortex. A new study has found that the cortex of the brain, which plays a key role in memory, attention, thought and language, is known to thin with age and this feature is used as one of the biological markers for cognitive decline in adults.
The study also found that it takes around 25 years without smoking for the brain cortex of ex-smokers to be indistinguishable from the brain context of non smokers.
McGill researchers compared the brain’s cortical thickness of 504 participants in their seventies. Those who had given up smoking for the longest had a thicker cortex compared to those who had given up more recently even after accounting for the total amount smoked over their lifetimes.
Original research paper published in Molecular Psychiatry on February 10, 2015.
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