Smokers are being urged to kick the habit for 2025 after a fresh assessment of the harms of cigarettes found they shorten life expectancy even more than doctors thought.
Researchers at University College London found that on average a single cigarette takes about 20 minutes off a person’s life, meaning that a typical pack of 20 cigarettes can shorten a person’s life by nearly seven hours.
According to the analysis, if a smoker on 10 cigarettes a day quits on January 1, they could prevent the loss of a full day of life by January 8. They could boost their life expectancy by a week if they quit until February 5 and a whole month if they stop until August 5. By the end of the year, they could have avoided losing 50 days of life, the assessment found, reports The Guardian.
“People generally know that smoking is harmful but tend to underestimate just how much,” said Dr Sarah Jackson, a principal research fellow at UCL’s alcohol and tobacco research group. “On average, smokers who don’t quit lose around a decade of life. That’s 10 years of precious time, life moments, and milestones with loved ones.”
While an earlier assessment in the BMJ in 2000 found that on average a single cigarette reduced life expectancy by about 11 minutes, the latest analysis published in the Journal of Addiction nearly doubles the figure to 20 minutes – 17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women.
“Some people might think they don’t mind missing out on a few years of life, given that old age is often marked by chronic illness or disability. But smoking doesn’t cut short the unhealthy period at the end of life,” Jackson told the Guardian. “It primarily eats into the relatively healthy years in midlife, bringing forward the onset of ill-health. This means a 60-year-old smoker will typically have the health profile of a 70-year-old non-smoker.”
Although some smokers live long lives, others develop smoking-related diseases and even die from them in their 40s. The variation is driven by differences in smoking habits such as the type of cigarette used, the number of puffs taken and how deeply smokers inhale. People also differ in how susceptible they are to the toxic substances in cigarette smoke.
Previous work showed that there is no safe level of smoking: the risk of heart disease and stroke is only about 50% lower for people who smoke one cigarette a day compared with those who smoke 20 a day. “Stopping smoking at every age is beneficial, but the sooner smokers get off this escalator of death the longer and healthier they can expect their lives to be,” they write.
Bd-pratidin English/Fariha Nowshin Chinika
