At this point there is no need to talk about how harmful smoking is. Today we know that it is bad for everything: for your health, for your productivity and for those around you. Therefore, for some time now efforts have focused on reducing the number of people who may be tempted to start. And smokers who can’t quit? There is good news for them too.
The study. New research from the University of Michigan School of Public Health has discovered something that has sometimes been questioned about smokers who have had a cigarette in their mouths for decades. The conclusion: you live longer regardless of the age at which you stop smoking. Or, put another way, it is never too late to quit, whether you are 20 or 75 years old.
The focus. The idea from which the team of researchers started was to demystify many of the campaigns and approaches of recent years. The linking of smoking with, for example, cancer and its variants, or with heart and lung diseases, has meant that those responsible for raising awareness among the smoking population to quit have focused on a larger group of people. or less young.
The key, as they indicate, is that oft-heard tagline “before it’s too late.” Therefore, they already had the focus of the study, is there really a time when it is too late to leave it?
As researcher and lead author Thuy Le explains: “We have seen a notable decline in smoking among young adults over the past decade. However, rates among older adults who smoke have remained stagnant and, as far as we know, no “Research had established the benefits of quitting smoking. We wanted to demonstrate that quitting is beneficial at any age and offer an incentive to older smokers to quit.”
Analyzing mortality. The first thing the team did was calculate age-specific death rates by smoking status. To do this, they used relative risks of mortality from all causes using data from a variety of national sources in the United States.
In this way, the groups were made up of people who never smoked, those who currently smoke, and those who had smoked but quit. With this information, what they called “life tables” were created, which showed the life expectancy of people in 10-year intervals between the ages of 35 and 75.
Results. What they found was that, compared to those who had never smoked, current smokers who had smoked throughout adulthood up to age 35, 45, 55, 65, or 75 will lose, on average, 9.1, 8.3, 7 .3, 5.9 and 4.4 years of life, respectively, if they continued smoking for the rest of their lives.
However, if they quit smoking at each of these ages, they would avoid an average loss of 8.0, 5.6, 3.4, 1.7, and 0.7 years, respectively. Among those who stopped smoking at age 65, the probability of gaining at least one year of life was 23.4%, and for those who stopped smoking at age 75, the probability was 14.2%. In other words, quitting smoking never stops being extremely positive, as shown by these odds even at 75 years old.
She was extra. Not only that. As indicated in the study, their data showed that almost 10% of people who stopped smoking at age 65 gained at least eight years of life compared to those who continued smoking, and 8% of those who stopped smoking at 75 years old won at least four years.
As the authors conclude, the benefit of quitting smoking is not limited to young and middle-aged adults who smoke, “this study demonstrates its applicability to older people as well. While the benefits of stopping at older ages may seem low in absolute terms, they represent a large proportion of a person’s remaining life expectancy.
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