Cosmopolitan

It’s no secret that smoking is extremely bad for your health, however new research has found it could be even more damaging than once thought.

A recent Israeli study that looked closely at military recruits (around 20,211 18-year-old males), is proposing the idea that those who smoke cigarettes have a lower IQ level than those who don’t. It also goes further to suggest that the more a person smokes, the lower their intelligence gets.

Dr. Mark Weiser and his team from the Sheba Medical Centre in Tel Hashomer, discovered that the young men that smoked a packet of ciggies or more each day had IQ scores at least 7.5 points lower than non-smokers.

"Adolescents with poorer IQ scores might be targeted for programmes designed to prevent smoking," Dr. Weiser and his team explain in the journal Addiction.

The study found that at least 28 per cent of all examined had smoked at leats one cigarette a day, about three per cent claimed to be ex-smokers and 68 per cent had never smoked.

Alarmingly, the smokers’ IQ levels were around 101, vastly lower than the non-smokers levels at 94. The level dropped steadily as the number of ciggies increased. Generally IQ scores in the scale from 84 to 116 are indications of average intelligence.