Excuse Me. Please Don't Smoke

A new brain-imaging study finds anti-smoking public service announcements stimulate different patterns of activity in the brains of smokers, depending on whether the ads are low-key or hard-hitting. Turns out smokers are more likely to remember seeing the low-key PSAs.

Some 43 million U.S. adults smoke. Smoking stimulates feel-good chemicals in the same part of the brain affected by heroin and morphine.

In fact, many feel the health risks have been overblown, and in a way, they are. Yes, smoking makes your breath stink and it significantly raises the risk you will die younger, but in fact fewer than 10 percent of lifelong smokers will get lung cancer.

Nonetheless, the links between smoking and death (by various means) are stark, as our Bad Medicine columnist Christopher Wanjek points out: About half of all smokers will die from smoking, and of these, about half will die before or around age 50.

"Few pastimes, habits or addictions are deadlier than smoking," Wanjek writes. "Only Russian roulette and scorpion juggling come to mind."

The backlash among smokers might be another argument supporting the softer approach to PSAs.

"This study highlights the feasibility of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine how the brain processes drug prevention messages," says NIDA Director Dr. Nora Volkow. "The next step is to determine whether better memory for the low key-PSAs translates into changing attitudes and behaviors. Ultimately this could improve our strategies for communicating public health information."

The study, published today in the journal NeuroImage, was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Cancer Institute.