Science Says Quitting Smoking At Any Age Is Good For The Brain

The rate of smoking cigarettes has steadily declined since the 1960s – when Congress required warnings on cigarette boxes. Research shows that people are more likely to try to quit smoking when they’re under 40. But a new study in the journal The Lancet Healthy Longevity https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568%2825%2900072-8/fulltext shows that quitting later in life can still be beneficial – and could possibly lower your risk for dementia. For this and more news from the science journals, Short Wave hosts Regina G. Barber https://www.npr.org/people/1082526815/regina-g-barber and Emily Kwong https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong talk with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly https://www.npr.org/people/2780701/mary-louise-kelly. Interested in knowing more about science behind the headlines? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:18Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:22Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here.

• 0:24Emily Kwong?

  And Emily Kwong.

• 0:25Regina Barber?

  With our biweekly science news roundup, this time featuring, and this is what I always say because it's true, the legendary Mary Louise Kelly. Of all things considered, welcome to the show again.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  I'm delighted to be here. I will try to live up to that billing. Okay, I hear we're going to be talking about why quitting smoking at any age is good for you.

• 0:44Regina Barber?

  That's right.

• 0:45Emily Kwong?

  You hear that, Dad?

• 0:45Regina Barber?

  It's important.

• 0:46Emily Kwong?

  Did you hear that? Okay. And we're also going to talk about a new way to support the language development of preterm babies.

• 0:52Regina Barber?

  Plus, an urban animal mystery.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  Animal whodunit. All right, let's go.

• 0:56Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 2:33Speaker 03

  Okay, let's start with smoking and memory. I didn't know there was a link. Gina kicks off.

• 2:39Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so the rate of smoking cigarettes has declined since the 1960s. That's when Congress required warnings on cigarette boxes. And researchers have found that people are more likely to try to quit smoking when they're under 40.

• 2:51Emily Kwong?

  However, a new study in the Lancet Health Longevity Journal shows quitting later in life can still be beneficial, and it could possibly lower your risk for dementia.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  And that's the interesting thing. I didn't realize there was a link between our brains, our memory, and smoking.

• 3:06Regina Barber?

  Yeah, yeah, so for that, we spoke to Michaela Bloomberg, an epidemiologist and lead author of the study. And Michaela said that smoking can damage small blood vessels in the brain. That can restrict oxygen flow, which can affect cognitive decline and lead to possible strokes.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  And was her study looking at the question of even if you quit well into adulthood, it's still beneficial?

• 3:27Regina Barber?

  Yeah, Michaela and her team looked at survey data of over 9,000 smokers from 12 different countries for almost two decades. Half of them quit smoking, and the other half continued. And the survey included cognitive test participants took over the years. And what the results showed is that people who quit smoking in middle age or even older age scored better than those who never quit.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  So even quitting later in life, it can help your brain? And I guess there's been research showing that quitting smoking can be beneficial for other parts of your health as well, even later in life.

• 3:58Emily Kwong?

  Yes, yeah, quitting smoking is better for your heart health later in life. A study in 2024 showed that even quitting around the age of 75 can extend life expectancy and reduce your risk of heart disease.

• 4:10Regina Barber?

  And so, Michaela, she wasn't surprised that quitting smoking would help the brain, too? What's good for your heart is good for your brain. So it's not an overly surprising result, but it's surprising in that we didn't see that the effect kind of weakened with age. Meaning quitting at any age seems to show a benefit. Now, Michaela points out that the study can't definitively say good cognitive scores mean, like, a lower risk of dementia. But I talked to a physician who didn't work on the study, Neil Benowitz, and he's very optimistic about the findings, saying that cognitive tests are good predictors of dementia later on.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Topic two, the far other extreme end of life. Tell me about language development in premature babies.

• 4:53Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, so a full pregnancy term is about 40 weeks. And in the womb, a lot happens. And hearing develops very early. The fetal auditory system actually starts to become functional at 24 weeks.

• 5:05Regina Barber?

  And as the weeks go by, the fetus can hear the sounds of the person carrying them. Here's how Melissa Scala put it. She's at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  You can hear mom talking all day long, right? Because they're sort of a captive audience. Totally a captive audience. You're stuck in your mom's tone the whole day long. I mean, that's true of all babies. Is there something distinct here about premies?

• 5:29Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so preemie babies, those are born before 37 weeks. They're at a higher risk for delays in language development. Among very preterm babies, up to one third can have problems with reading or speaking later on.

• 5:41Emily Kwong?

  And scientists suspect that one of the reasons may be that because premies come out earlier, they're in the NICU and not getting to constantly eavesdrop on the sounds of speech like they would in the womb. The NICU sounds nothing like the womb. And parents do visit, right, to do skin to skin contact? But they can't be in the NICU around the clock.

• 5:59Regina Barber?

  So Melissa and her colleagues tried an intervention using sound.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Sound. As a sound person, as a radio person, I'm totally intrigued. What kind of sound?

• 6:07Emily Kwong?

  They played a recording of their moms reading the book Paddington Bear.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 6:11Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Regina Barber?

  I know.

• 6:12Emily Kwong?

  For 160 minutes every night. Forty-six premies already in the hospital's care were signed up for this. Some got this intervention, some did it. The book starts, "Mr. and Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform."

• 6:24Speaker 03

  I love this. I want to listen to my mom for 160 minutes. I hate reading me Paddington Bear. How did, how did the preemie babies react? How did it affect their language development?

• 6:36Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so it did help, like, compared to the control group, who didn't get the recordings. The babies in the intervention group had more mature white matter in key language areas of the brain. And the researchers published these results in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience this week.

• 6:51Emily Kwong?

  Now, scientists don't know the effect of this intervention long term. The study wasn't designed for that. It was a small cohort, just 46 babies. So Melissa says the plan is to repeat this intervention with a larger cohort of children. Who are even more premature and with whom the hospital can follow up in a year, in two years to see how their language develops.

• 7:09Regina Barber?

  And research like this has changed preemie care at the hospital. They now give all preemie parents free books to read and the chance to record their voices.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  I've got to think that's beneficial for the parents, too. That's a whole nother study we need to do. Okay, last one, let's wrap up the urban animal mystery.

• 7:27Emily Kwong?

  Yes, I'm so excited about this. Okay, Mary Louise, do you remember the 2024 viral sensation, the Chicago rat hole?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  I'm so happy to tell you I do not.

• 7:38Emily Kwong?

  You're living life offline. We love that for you. Okay, all right. So you know when someone makes a handprint in wet concrete, it hardens into a shape?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:45Emily Kwong?

  Picture a Chicago sidewalk where there's a whole imprint shaped kind of like a rat.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Big.

• 7:50Emily Kwong?

  That's what it is. Comedian Winslow Domain posted about visiting this so-called rat hole on social media, and people started flocking to it, leaving offerings, and there was even a wedding.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  We are gathered here today to marry man and man in front of the honorable Chicago rat hole.

• 8:14Regina Barber?

  And all this caught the attention of zoologist Michael Granatowski at the University of Tennessee. He studies how animals evolve their movements, and in his scientific opinion.

• 8:23Speaker 07

  It looks a whole lot like a rat, and so it's a good guess.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  A good guess, was it the right guess?

• 8:29Regina Barber?

  Well, that's where this mystery comes in, right? Like, Michael was seen post on social media where people were guessing it could be a squirrel because it was next to a tree, and he thought.

• 8:40Speaker 07

  What a great way to actually try and show the public that, you know, all of us are doing science when we take guesses.

• 8:48Emily Kwong?

  So Michael's team decided to turn this event into a research project. Who done it?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Which is blowing my mind because I'm thinking, how do you scientifically prove that this was a rat that she imprinted in the Chicago cement?

• 9:00Regina Barber?

  Right, science is amazing, right? So they collected pictures of the rat hole from the internet since the actual imprint was actually removed last year. And using these pictures, they took a bunch of like body measurements, and they compared these measurements to taxidermied animals from the American Museum of Natural History, from rats and squirrels to mice and muskrats. And they ran a bunch of statistics and they found.

• 9:22Speaker 07

  It is not a rat. It's definitely not a rat.

• 9:25Emily Kwong?

  It was a squirrel.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  A squirrel?

• 9:26Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, Chicago squirrel hole.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  What are we supposed to take away from this? This mystery solved?

• 9:34Regina Barber?

  What are we supposed to take away? Yeah, there is science. There's something to take away here. So other scientists we talked to say it's like a really clever way of highlighting how science is done. And Michael hopes it will encourage more people to explore the natural world.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Explore the natural world, as we'd love to do.

• 9:49Regina Barber?

  Yes. And we love when you come on the show. It's true.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Oh, I love it. I'll come back anytime.

• 9:57Regina Barber?

  You can hear more of Mary Louise Kelly on Consider This and NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Kai McNamee and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Antalyada. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Simon Laszlo Jansen. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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