Light Up Your Memory, Not A Cigarette - Quitting Smoking Boosts Recall Function .

Add decreased memory function to the list of health ailments that smoking can cause: A new study shows smokers have worse memories than non-smokers. Ditching the cigarettes, however, could bring back some of that memory function. On a practical recall test, people who had quit smoking for a few years performed 25% better than current smokers; people who had never smoked scored 37% better.

You know, studies like this give me hope that what seem like extremely high rates of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and milder forms of cognitive impairment amongst our grandparents’ generation could be linked to the extremely high rates of smoking, drinking and processed/fatty food eating they once engaged in. Maybe we can all do better for our brains, right? Right?

In this current study, conducted by researchers at England’s Northumbria University, 27 smokers, 18 former smokers and 24 folks who’d never smoked were given a list of 15 locations around the university’s campus and an action to perform at each location (such as checking their cell phone for messages, or inquiring about a gym membership). Without the list in hand, smokers performed an average of 8.9 tasks correctly; non-smokers averaged 12.1 correct tasks and former smokers 11. The idea was to test practical or ‘prospective memory,’ the ability to remember to carry out an action at a future point in time, as opposed to ‘retrospective memory,’ the ability to learn information and recall it later. Previous studies have already shown quitting smoking to improve retrospective memory.

“Given that there are up to 10 million smokers in the UK and as many as 45 million in the United States,” lead researcher Tom Heffernan said, “it’s important to understand the effects smoking has on everyday cognitive function – of which prospective memory is an excellent example.”

What’s the correlation between smoking and memory based on? Researchers aren’t sure, but one theory is that chronic smoking is linked to atrophy in parts of the brain, and perhaps this affects areas of the brain associated with memory, such as the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus or thalamus.