The more cigarettes you smoke per day, the more your brain shrinks, researchers say. You can read what the consequences of this are here.
Anyone who smokes allows their brain to shrink. This is what researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (USA) have now found out. The scientists led by psychiatrist Laura Bierut examined data from around 32,000 people regarding their brain volume, their smoking history and their genetic risk for smoking. They found that smokers have smaller brains. And the more cigarettes a person smokes per day, the smaller their brain volume.
The shrinking process can be stopped
The good news: If you stop smoking, you stop further loss of brain tissue. However, the organ will no longer regain its original size, according to the scientists. The shrinking process is irreversible.
It has been proven that the human brain loses volume as we age. If you smoke, this process is accelerated, according to the study, which was published in the journal “Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science”. Smoking makes people age faster. This helps explain why smokers have a high risk of age-related cognitive decline (memory and attention disorders), dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers say.
“So far, science has neglected the effects of smoking on the brain, partly because people have focused on the lungs and heart. But when we started studying the organ in more detail, we quickly realized that smoking was dangerous for it brain,” senior study author Laura Bierut is quoted as saying in a press release from the Washington University School of Medicine.
There had already been research into the connection between brain volume and smoking. What’s new about Washington’s work is that a third factor was included: human genes.
Smoking is a risk factor for dementia
About half of the risk of becoming a smoker can be attributed to genes, write the authors, who say they were able to determine a connection between all three factors – genes, smoking and brain volume. They conclude that genetic predisposition favors smoking, which in turn leads to reduced brain volume.
“It sounds bad, and it is,” says Bierut. “A reduction in brain volume is consistent with increasing aging. This is important as our population ages, as both aging and smoking are risk factors for dementia.”