Regina G. Barber

Beth Donovan is our vice president of podcasting.

I'm Regina Barber.

Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, short wavers.

Regina Barber here.

And Emily Kwong.

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.

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.

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.

And so, Michaela, she wasn't surprised that quitting smoking would help the brain, too.

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