Smokers pondering their New Year resolutions might want to think about this: researchers at University College London (UCL) found that on average, a single cigarette takes 20 minutes off a person’s life, nearly twice as much as estimated in previous research.
According to the UCL analysis, reported in the Guardian, if a smoker on 10 cigarettes a day quits on 1 January, they could prevent the loss of a full day of life by 8 January. By 5 February, their life expectancy would be boosted by a week, and by 5 August, a whole month. By the end of the year, they could avoid losing 50 days of life expectancy. While quitting an addictive habit like smoking is difficult and often requires multiple attempts, these findings indicate that every attempt is beneficial.
“People generally know that smoking is harmful but tend to underestimate just how much,” Dr Sarah Jackson, a principal research fellow at UCL’s alcohol and tobacco research group, told the Guardian. They also misunderstand how the impact on life expectancy works: rather than cutting short unhealthy years at the end of life, “it primarily eats into the relatively healthy years in midlife, bringing forward the onset of ill-health.”
[See more: Smoking prevalence in Macao has fallen to just over 10 percent]
The UK study, commissioned by the Department of Health, utilises data from two decades-long other studies: the British Doctors Study, which began in 1951 as one of the world’s first large research initiatives into the health effects of smoking, and the Million Women Study, which has been tracking women’s health since 1996. Their results, published in the Journal of Addiction, found that on average a single cigarette reduced life expectancy by 17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women, averaging to 20 minutes overall.
Researchers also found that simply reducing cigarette consumption isn’t sufficient, as cutting back from 20 cigarettes a day to just one only resulted in about 50 percent lower risk of heart disease and stroke. The study authors emphasise that, “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.”
Smoking is one of the world’s leading preventable causes of death and disease, and nearly one-third of the world’s smokers are in China, home to some 316 million adult smokers. More than a million Chinese people die each year from the habit. That figure is only expected to increase, with projections estimating 2 million annual deaths in China by 2030 and 3 million by 2050.
