Lifelong smokers can expect their lives to be cut short by about 10 years, according to a new study appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study also found that smoking tobacco harms women as much as men.
We all know that smoking is bad for you, but now there's some hard numbers to back up that well founded claim. The study involved research into government data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey on more than 200,000 people starting from 1997 and going until 2004.
Researchers looked into peoples' smoking histories, their diet, alcohol consumption level, education, weight and body fat. They then compared records from the National Death Index, and calculated the increased mortality accounted for by smoking.
Other studies had been done in the 1980s that resulted in similar mortality statistics, but with a few notable differences. First, the gender difference in smoking habits has disappeared: Female smokers from the 1960s through the 1980s tended to smoke fewer cigarettes and started smoking, on average, later than men. In health studies, women appeared to be less effected by smoking than men. Now, smoking habits are the same between both genders, and so is the health risk, find researchers.
The other major difference is that nowadays, over half of the people now who ever smoked have quit, so researchers can now take a look into the effects of quitting at different ages. They've found that smokers who quit before they're 35 years old, on average, gained about 10 years back. If they smoke until 45 and then quit, they will gain about nine of those years back. And even if smokers don't quit until they're 60 years old, they will gain an average of four to six years of their life back.
Those are averages, of course, so health impacts can vary from person to person, but the study does give credence to the modern anti-smoking mantra, "it's never too late to quit."