London, Oct. 29: A new study has revealed that people who smoke are more likely to be impulsive and indecisive than those who have never smoked in their life.
Researchers of the Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin and Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have found that a specific region of the cerebral cortex of smokers is thinner than that of people who don’t smoke.
This region is decisive for reward, impulse control, and the making of decisions. To investigate the relation between cortical thickness and nicotine dependence, the brains of 22 smokers and 21 people who have never smoked in their lives were investigated. A comparison of the two groups showed that in the case of smokers, the thickness of the medial orbito-frontal cortex is, on average, smaller than in the case of people who have never smoked.
Although it is known from animal experiments that nicotine changes the development of the brain and damages neurocytes, it cannot be ruled out that the reduced thickness of the frontal cortex region found in the case of the participants in the study existed before they started smoking.