Smoking Causes Stupidity in Children

It turns out that smoking not only damages the lungs, but pregnancy and fetal disorders are also a major danger for a smoker. One of the most vital things for the younger generation is that smoking is also dangerous for the human brain.

What are the effects like?

The Live Science study also found that people who smoke have a smaller brain volume than people who don't smoke.

The study, published in the pre-print database medRxiv, provides evidence that smoking can cause brain shrinkage.

"This is a very important study," wrote Dajiang Liu, who studies the genetics of smoking risk at Penn State College of Medicine and was not involved in the study.

"This study was conducted rigorously and the results are important from a public health perspective," he added.

Smokers' Brains Are Up to 7.1 Cubic Centimeters Smaller

Secondhand smoke Danger

The steps taken by the research team were to analyze brain imaging data from the U.K. Biobank is a genetic and health data bank based in England.

Apart from conducting research through brain scans, the research team also analyzed smoking habits reported by respondents and collected in surveys.

Respondents will answer the survey on two occasions, namely around 2006 to 2010 and will complete the survey again in 2012 and 2013.

In the second time span, data was also taken from the respondents' brains using the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method.

Through this data, the researchers found that respondents who had a daily smoking habit had a smaller average brain volume of 7.1 cubic centimeters compared to participants who did not smoke.

 

Read more Pregnant But Smoking?

 

Decreased Volume of Ash Matter in the Brain

The difference in brain volume is also the impact of a 5.5 cc decrease in brain gray matter which contains large brain cells or neurons.

In the past, daily smoking was also associated with a 1.6 cubic centimeter decrease in the brain's white matter, which includes the long, isolated tracts that connect neurons.

The researchers also found that respondents who smoked more cigarettes showed greater differences in ash matter volume.

If a smoker consumes one pack of cigarettes every day for one year, it is estimated that the volume of ash material will decrease by an average of around 0.15 cc.

The relationship between smoking dose and its impact on reducing brain volume is one of the supporting evidence for the idea that smoking can reduce brain volume, as written by the researchers.

However, the number of cigarettes consumed did not have a significant impact on the volume of their brain's white matter.

Quitting Smoking Can Increase Brain Volume

Researchers then conducted further analysis and found that people who had quit smoking longer had a slight increase in brain gray matter compared to people who had recently quit smoking.

This shows that quitting smoking can slightly increase brain volume. For example, quitting smoking for a year can experience an increase in brain gray matter volume of 0.09 cc compared to daily smokers.

In addition, the research team also examined the respondents' genetic data to find out whether gene variants could influence the risk of smoking which might be related to differences in the volume of gray matter in the brain.

As a result, it was found that people who had a higher genetic risk were more likely to have smoked. However, their genetics is isolated and not related to the volume of ash matter.

On the other hand, daily smoking history was related to the volume of ash matter. This supports the idea that smoking causes changes in brain size to become smaller.

Brain shrinkage is often associated with neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's. Liu wrote that establishing a causal relationship between smoking and brain shrinkage could deepen our understanding of whether smoking can promote the onset of this disease.

Liu added that he would conduct further experiments to help confirm the causal relationship between smoking and brain size and the effectiveness of drugs that can help prevent damage to brain tissue.

 

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