{"id":3869,"date":"2015-02-10T16:25:36","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T21:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/?p=3869"},"modified":"2015-02-10T16:25:36","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T21:25:36","slug":"quitting-is-good-for-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/quitting-is-good-for-the-brain\/","title":{"rendered":"Quitting is good for the brain<img src=\"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/canada_flag_icon_small.gif\">"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/SMCC-english2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-110\" src=\"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/SMCC-english2.jpg\" alt=\"SMCC-english2\" width=\"255\" height=\"126\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>People who quit smoking may reduce or halt the thinning of the brain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>McGill researchers compared the brain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/mp\/journal\/vaop\/ncurrent\/full\/mp2014187a.html\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Original research paper<\/span><\/a>\u00a0published in <em>Molecular Psychiatry\u00a0<\/em>on\u00a0<strong>February 10<\/strong><span class=\"aBn\" tabindex=\"0\" data-term=\"goog_453723367\"><span class=\"aQJ\"><strong>, 2015<\/strong>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em><strong>Names and affiliations of selected\u00a0authors<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<h4>Sherif Karama, McGill University, Quebec<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People who quit smoking may reduce or halt the thinning of the brain\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[992,51,53,200,476,849,1666],"class_list":["post-3869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paper-of-interest","tag-brain","tag-health","tag-medicine","tag-neurology","tag-public-health","tag-quebec-en","tag-smoking"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4DqbN-10p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3869"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3883,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3869\/revisions\/3883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sciencemediacentre.ca\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}