smoking slows down your brain

smoking cigarettes can lower the accuracy and speed of your thinking ability

In their 9thyear in the study, participants completed the MicroCog Assessment of Cognitive Function, a well-established standard group of tests that assess short-term memory, immediate and delayed story recall, verbal analogies, mathematical reasoning and visual-spatial processing.

Scores for each test, and a global proficiency score, are based on the accuracy and speed of a person's responses, adjusted for education level and age. The participants also took a short form of the standard IQ test, and their scores were adjusted for age.

40 of the men had clinically diagnosable alcoholism at the time of the test, though none had been drinking within an hour of the tests. 24 of these men also were smokers. The study also included sixty three men who had had alcoholism earlier in life, twenty-nine of whom smoked; and sixty-nine men who had never been alcoholic, thirteen of whom smoked. All smokers were allowed to smoke at any time during the testing session, so none were in a nicotine-deprived state when they took the neurocognitive tests.

Glass and her colleagues analyzed the participants' scores using 2 standard measures of long-term smoking and drinking behavior: lifetime alcohol problem severity, or LAPS, and pack-years, a measure that takes into account the number of packets of cigarettes a person smoked each day and the number of years they smoked that much.