Posted on 02/23/2010 11:38:41 AM PST by nickcarraway
Cigarette smokers have lower IQs than non-smokers, and the more a person smokes, the lower their IQ, a study in over 20,000 Israeli military recruits suggests.
Young men who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day or more had IQ scores 7.5 points lower than non-smokers, Dr. Mark Weiser of Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and his colleagues found.
"Adolescents with poorer IQ scores might be targeted for programs designed to prevent smoking," they conclude in the journal Addiction.
Slideshow: Celebrities Who Quit Smoking
While there is evidence for a link between smoking and lower IQ, many studies have relied on intelligence tests given in childhood, and have also included people with mental and behavioral problems, who are both more likely to smoke and more likely to have low IQs, Weiser and his team note in their report.
To better understand the smoking-IQ relationship, the researchers looked at 20,211 18-year-old men recruited into the Israeli military. The group did not include anyone with major mental health problems, because these individuals are disqualified from military service.
According to the investigators, 28 percent of the study participants smoked at least one cigarette a day, around 3 percent said they were ex-smokers, and 68 percent had never smoked.
The smokers had significantly lower intelligence test scores than non-smokers, and this remained true even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic status as measured by how many years of formal education a recruit's father had completed.
The average IQ for non-smokers was about 101, while it was 94 for men who had started smoking before entering the military. IQ steadily dropped as the number of cigarettes smoked increased, from 98 for people who smoked one to five cigarettes daily to 90 for those who smoked more than a pack a day.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
It appears that almost everyone they arrest on any episode of Cops or Dog the bounty hunter is a smoker... lol...correlation?
Gotta be stupid to smoke.
I thought that IQ tests were not accurate anymore?
When causality **might** be bi-directional, it is a classic error in formal logic to conclude, absent other evidence, that one or the other direction of causality is correct. If anyone cares, this fallacy is an instance of what is known technically as 'violation of disjunction'.
Then, of course, this article is also subject to the well-known objection that 'correlation is not causality', aka post hoc ergo propter hoc.
In short, I think people would be well-advised to simply take the correlation data at face value, and avoid drawing these sorts of conclusions. Assuming of course (which might be dangerous, these days) that the study was conducted scrupulously by individuals without a sociopolitical agenda.
It is absolutely amazing that somehow throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, a period that saw the world transformed through major scientific discoveries leading to undreamed of creature comforts, people smoked and we somehow got to this thriving and prosperous stage.
I suppose we’d be that much further ahead if no one had smoked during that time.
I'd like to suggest where they can stick their study...where the sun doesn't shine.
Yeah right....then how about all them smart folks who smoked for years before the nanny state?????
Except in those it doesn’t. Not all lung cancer is from smoking. My grandmother NEVER smoked a day in her life and yet....While her daughter smoked all of her adult life. They lived to be the same age. My auntie passed away from what doctors called old age. ( and had no cancer of any sort). My mother who smoked and then quit passed away from vaginal cancer -—hardly associated with smoking.
And if he hadn’t smoked a pipe I guess Einstein would have been REEEELY smart!
Must be, I used to smoke, I am no more brilliant now than I was then! /s
I wonder who smokes the most? The Obama voters or the McCain voters?
I really should not have asked that question.
“Who knew?”
Incoming! Incoming!
What you make lack in the intelligence quotient, you make up in courage! LOL!
When your hung like a mule, does it really matter how smart you are?
More ignorance of simple statistics.
Fact #1: no two groups will EVER be exactly the same in IQ, shoe size, height, salary, average SSN, and/or commute time, or any other attribute that can be boiled down to a numeric value.
Fact #2: This "disparity" is often not even statistically significant, and virtually never says ANYTHING about those two groups, because A) "Correlation does not equal causation", and B) the group that is ahead/on top/higher this year may very likely be the group that's behind/below/lower next year.
Fact #3: Journalism majors will print ANY headline to get attention, whether it is factual, logical, or even related to the following text.
and have now created “third hand smoke”. I typed for a pulmonologist who always went out of his way to blame any lung cancer on smoking. Crazy. A 90 year old with a dad who had smoked died of “second hand smoke lung cancer”. Yeah right. These scientists are just like the GW scientists, not really scientists but agenda driven.
Dear Mr Mule,
The last time I saw anything hung was after we shot an elk. We hung it in a tree to age, skin, and butcher.
Signed, Grandma
Pure BS, they might make a poor choice to continue smoking with the government taxing them so heavy for it, and knowing the health risk, but IQ is not a factor. My late husband had a 130 IQ, he knew the risk, and couldn’t get off them after nearly 35 years doing smoking.
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