In the heyday of cigarette smoking, a pack a day was "just what the doctor ordered." Of course, the purported health benefits of smoking have been largely debunked, and cigarettes today are associated with serious health hazards.
But smoking may still have at least one advantage: protection against the development of Parkinson's disease. A large-scale study published in Wednesday's online edition of the journal Neurology further bolsters the connection and concludes that the longer you smoke, the less likely you are to develop the illness.
In 2007, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health analyzed 11 separate studies and concluded that cigarette smoking protected against Parkinson's but that benefits waned once a smoker quit. But the effect was a strong one: Smokers were 73 percent less likely to suffer from Parkinson's than those who'd never lit up.
