Smokers who quit have some common factors.

By Raif Karerat

WASHINGTON, DC: If you’re a smoker who’s forced yourself to kick the habit, your genetics may have wired your brain for success long before you made the decision to lost the cigarettes, according to a new U.S. study.

According to Reuters, researchers reviewed brain scans of smokers who tried to quit and found the people who succeeded had something in common: a stronger connection between the insula, home to urges and cravings, and the somatosensory cortex, which handles touch and motor control.

“The insula is believed to be where we are consciously aware of physical sensations, such as pain, disgust, craving and emotions,” lead study author Merideth Addicott, a researcher in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, told Reuters via by email.

In order to make their conclusions, scientists took MRI scans of 85 people one month before they tried to quit. They then proceeded to track the subjects for 10 weeks to determine whether they succeeded or not.

At the start of the study, participants typically smoked an average of 19 cigarettes a day and had been smoking for around 19 years. Their average age was 38, and slightly more than half of them were women, reported Reuters.

One shortcoming of the study is that it relied on participants to truthfully report whether or not they smoked, and another drawback is the lack of repeated MRIs throughout the study period, researchers acknowledge in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

“Factors like genetics, duration of exposure to tobacco, stress, other drug use, and psychiatric or medical disorders can affect treatment success,” said Amy Janes, a psychiatry and addiction researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The effectiveness of a specific treatment may depend on individual differences in factors like brain function and communication between brain regions,” she explained to Reuters by email.

One method many individuals have been taking advantage of in their efforts to drop smoking are e-cigarettes.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) said there are now 2.6 million “vapers” in the U.K., up from 2.1 million in 2014, with nearly all of the increase attributed to ex-smokers who switched to e-cigarettes.

“The number of ex-smokers who are staying off tobacco by using electronic cigarettes is growing, showing just what value they can have,” stated Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking Health (ASH), to South Wales Argus. “The proven harm of tobacco is currently getting less coverage than the much smaller and far less certain harm from electronic cigarettes. We owe it to smokers to provide them with accurate information,” she concluded.