Research Reveals Disturbing New Side Effect of Secondhand Smoke
Most of us are aware by now that not only is smoking detrimental to the health who do it, but also to everyone in their vicinity, as secondhand smoke has been labeled a culprit in diseases like respiratory infections, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and lung cancer.
Oops — and we almost forgot memory loss.
This news comes courtesy of researchers from the United Kingdom’s Northumbria University, who say recent study findings suggest that secondhand smoke actually causes weaker memory recall.
To demonstrate the effects of smoking on memory, researchers collected study data from a group of 27 smokers and two groups of non-smokers — one regularly exposed to secondhand smoke and the other not regularly exposed.
Researchers then asked all of the study participants to complete some type of a task at a designated time, as well as request each person recall certain events and activities that took place during the study.
What they found was that those non-smokers frequently subjected to secondhand smoke scored 20 percent worse than their non-smoking counterparts who are not regularly subjected to secondhand smoke.
Those who do smoke cannot seem to remember anything, scoring 30 percent worse than non-smokers under the common influence of secondhand smoke.
It is worth mentioning that this was the first study of its kind to examine the connection between smoking and memory.