GIVEN the wealth of evidence that smoking damages your health, you would have to be stupid not to kick the habit. Now a study suggests this could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because smoking reduces your IQ.
Lawrence Whalley of the University of Aberdeen in the UK and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh looked at how the cognitive ability of 465 individuals, approximately half of whom were smokers, changed over their lifetime and whether this related to their smoking habits. They had all been tested in 1947 at age 11 as part of the Scottish Mental Survey, which made no…
