If you're thinking about making a New Year's resolution to quit smoking, it might help to know that new research says it could extend your life expectancy.
Each cigarette someone smokes, on average, can take about 20 minutes off their life expectancy overall, according to new research based on British smokers.
After accounting for socioeconomic status and other factors, researchers at University College London estimated the loss of life expectancy per cigarette is at about 17 minutes for men and 22 for women.
Dr. Sarah Jackson, a principal research fellow in the UCL Alcohol and Tobacco Research Group and lead author of the paper says that means if someone smokes a pack of 20 cigarettes per day, 20 cigarettes at 20 minutes per cigarette works out to be almost seven hours of life lost per pack.
Dr Jackson says the time they are losing is time that they could be spending with their loved ones in fairly good health.
The research, which was commissioned by the UK Department for Health and Social Care, includes mortality data on men from the British Doctors Study and data on women from the Million Women Study.
These studies found that on average, people who smoked throughout their lives lost around 10 years of life compared with people who never smoked.
Similarly, in the United States, life expectancy for smokers is estimated to be at least 10 years shorter than for nonsmokers, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In their paper, Dr. Jackson and her colleagues wrote that a person smoking 10 cigarettes per day who quits smoking on January 1 could prevent the loss of a full day of life by January 8.
They could prevent loss of a full week of life by February 20 and a full month by August 5 and by the end of the year, they could have avoided losing 50 days of life expectancy.
Dr Jackson says stopping smoking is, without a doubt, the best thing you can do for your health, and the sooner you stop smoking, the longer you will live.
A separate study, published last year in the journal Nature, found that smoking can have both short-term and long-term effects on a person's immune system, leaving them vulnerable to the risk of developing infections, cancers or autoimmune diseases.
The study also found that the more someone smoked, the more it changed their immune response.
When smokers in the study quit, their immune response got better at one level, but it did not completely recover for years, according to study co-author Dr. Darragh Duffy, who leads the Translational Immunology unit at the Institut Pasteur.
He says the good news is, it does begin to reset.
Dr. Duffy says it's never a good time to start smoking, but if you are a smoker, the best time to stop is now.
[Source: CNN]
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