Here's some extra motivation for anyone looking to quit smoking as part of their New Year's resolutions. Research published this week found that every cigarette you smoke will shorten your life by almost half an hour.
Scientists at University College London conducted the study, which is an update on a previous estimate of how life-sapping smoking can be. Based on more recent data, they calculated that one cigarette takes about twenty minutes off the average person's life. The findings emphasize the importance of quitting smoking as soon as possible, the researchers said.
Many studies and tragic anecdotes bear this out smoking deadlines. Smoking can damage almost every organ and increase the risk of life-threatening health problems such as emphysema, heart disease, and lung and mouth cancers, to name a few. But UCL researchers want to better quantify the damage smoking does to our lifespans using the latest data available.
A 2000 study of British smokers estimated that each cigarette costs a person about 11 minutes of life on average. That estimate relied on assumptions derived from data on men only, however, such as studies that tracked the average age of male smokers at death compared to nonsmokers. This time, UCL researchers also analyzed data from female smokers in the UK. They also analyzed more recent data on the deaths of British men along with data on how many daily cigarettes people smoked on average.
Overall, after adjusting for other factors such as a person's wealth, the researchers estimated that people who never quit smoking lost about 10 to 11 years from their life expectancy. relative to a non-smoker—higher than the previous estimate of 6.5 years of lost life. They also estimated that each cigarette costs 20 minutes of life on average—17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women.
Most of these stolen minutes, the researchers say, are taken from a person's middle and healthy years, rather than at the end of their life. In other words, smokers tend to experience the common health issues of aging for the same duration but reach that stage earlier. As an example, the researchers emphasized that a 60-year-old lifelong smoker would be expected to have the average health of a 70-year-old non-smoker.
“This is time most likely spent in relatively good health,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published Sunday in the journal Addiction.
The findings still rely on certain assumptions about the harms of smoking—harms that are not equally distributed among all. Not all smokers will develop lung cancer, for example. Cigarettes these days also contain less tar than they used to decades agoso smokers today may be exposed to fewer toxins than before. That said, “low tar” cigarettes do not appear significantly lower people risk of cancer or other problems (one reason smokers may tend to take larger puffs to get more nicotine).
Fortunately, people in general are smoking less than before, which has helped contribute to lower cancer cases and deaths. But smoking and secondhand smoke are estimate more to help cause nearly half a million deaths in the US alone each year. Although the damage from smoking can permanently shorten life, it's still beneficial to quit no matter how old you are, researchers say. But the sooner you quit, the better off you'll be.
“Quitting smoking at every age is beneficial but the earlier smokers get off the death escalator the longer and healthier they can expect to live,” they wrote.
