Major Study Gives Smokers New Reasons to Quit
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Brand X Pictures/Thinkstock(TORONTO) — Quit smoking early on in life and you’ll have more life later on, reveals a new study from the Center for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
However, Dr. Prabhat Jha, a director at the center, warns that smokers need to do it by age 35 if they want to make sure of not lopping a decade off their life expectancy.
In another finding based on research of over 200,000 American men and women, Jha says that the death rate of people who are addicted to cigarettes is three times higher than people who’ve never picked up the habit.
Generally, smokers have a greater prevalence of potentially deadly conditions like cancer, heart disease, stroke and respiratory diseases
Jha says that if people can kick cigarettes by age 55, they can still improve their chances of a longer life than if they don’t stop.
Need more evidence that smoking just isn’t worth it? Jha and her fellow researchers learned that people who don’t smoke are twice more likely to survive to 80 than perpetual puffers.
Responding to the finding, Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer of the American Lung Association, said Jha and his team “used a very large database, so the chance that this is accurate is really high…The numbers are very, very compelling, and it points out that smoking prevention and cessation is still the most important public health challenge we have in the United States.”
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