Scientists at Oxford University have found that quitting smoking can improve mental health in people with and without mental health problems. The results of the study are published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

The work used data from a randomized clinical trial to assess the adverse effects of smoking in the period from 2011 to 2015, which included 4260 participants. Approximately half of the subjects had a history of mental illness. The authors studied the impact of abstinence from cigarette use for 9-24 weeks. Before and after quitting, participants were asked to complete questionnaires that included questions about mental health. In particular, measures of anxiety and depression were measured using a clinical rating scale from 0 to 21.

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The initial mean score among the sample was 4.25 for anxiety and 2.44 for depression. After 24 weeks of quitting smoking, patients showed a significant improvement in symptoms. After adjusting for demographics and baseline variables, smoking cessation was associated with a reduction in both anxiety (minus 0.4 points) and depression (minus 0.47 points) compared with the group that continued to smoke.

In April, researchers at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health found that breathing in airborne particles was associated with an increased risk of developing dementia: every two micrograms of the substance increased the risk of neurodegenerative disease by 17 percent.