This is welcome news of course for the many who have dabbled. It
also is expected but now confirmed. After all the indications are
that smoking is a cumulative disease and toxicity is also better
handled by the young, it is most likely that the negative effects
will strike in the aging smoker as is observed.
It is also observed that several years of abstinence appears good
enough to allow the full recovery of the body although that is moot
if a cancer has been established.
The point of all this is that it is obviously stupid to smoke at all
and it is doubly stupid to continue after reaching age forty.
Smokers who quit
before age 40 live almost as long as people who never smoked: Ontario
study
Jason Rehel Jan 24,
2013
Young people who give
up smoking tobacco before reaching the age of 40 can reasonably
expect to live nearly as long as others who’ve never smoking
cigarettes at all, a new groundbreaking study of U.S. health and
death records has shown.
Smoking, which can cut
at least 10 years off someone’s lifespan, ensnares 30 million young
adults each year (about half of all young men and 10% of young women)
and most do not quit.
“Quitting smoking
before age 40, and preferably well before 40, gives back almost all
of the decade of lost life from continued smoking,” said Dr.
Prabhat Jha, head of the Centre for Global Health Research at St.
Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
“That’s not to
say, however, that it is safe to smoke until you are 40 and then
stop,” said Jha. “Former smokers still have a greater risk of
dying sooner than people who never smoked. But the risk is small
compared to the huge risk for those who continue to smoke.”
The findings were
published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Jha’s used data from
the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, which includes a
cross-section of the population that’s surveyed every year about
many health topics. More than 200,000 survey participants were linked
to the National Death Index, which includes death certificate
information for all Americans since 1986.
Researchers working
with Jha found that people who quit smoking between ages 35 and 44
gained about nine years and those who quit between ages 45-54 and
55-64 gained six and four years of life, respectively. This survey of
existing data is considered a more accurate gauge than similar
studies in the past that were skewed by data collected mainly from
nurses or other health care workers.
Smoking, which was
responsible for the early deaths of 100 million people in the 20th
century, is expected to claim one billion lives in the 21st century,
mainly in the developing world. Jha says that without a push to
increase taxes on cigarettes as has been successfully deployed in
France and here in Canada, governments should expect their epidemics
of smoking-related diseases to worsen.
Taxation is the single
most effective step to get adults to quit and to prevent children
from starting, he said.
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