Ken Wassum, Associate Director, Clinical Development & Support

A new study from Northumbria University, England, adds to the evidence that quitting smoking can help to improve memory and cognitive function. Study results showed that former smokers who have been quit for 2.5 years or longer did 25% better than current smokers in memory related tasks. The full article can be found in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Smokers wanting to quit have many reasons to do so, but most are related to fears of getting lung cancer or heart disease. As we age, our memory capacity can decline, and previous studies have demonstrated that smoking impacts the ability to learn information and retrieve it later. This study added to this body of knowledge by measuring the ability of smokers, former smokers, and never-smokers to remember to carry out a task in the future.

Our lives have become busier and busier in recent decades. Despite the fact that we have many time-saving tools many people report having less free time and experiencing greater difficulty remembering to do planned tasks.  How often has someone contacted you and jogged your memory that you had agreed to do something that you completely forgot about? All of us have experienced this and it is usually a disconcerting event. 

Memory challenges can come with age, but it appears these challenges are more pronounced among smokers. It is suspected that smoking can damage the functionality of certain parts of the brain that are associated with memory. As with many other parts of our body, it also appears that quitting can help heal damaged parts and those quitters can regain much of the previously lost functionality. It would also seem that the sooner someone quits, the less pronounced the damage will be and the better the recovery will be.

Those who quit smoking can not only look forward to improved physical health, but also better cognitive functioning.