Each cigarette costs you 20 minutes of life, warns a new study

Here’s extra motivation for anyone trying to quit smoking as part of their New Year’s resolutions. Research published this week finds that every cigarette you smoke shortens your life by nearly half an hour.

Scientists from the University College London conducted the study, which is an update of a previous estimate of how cigarette smoke can be. Based on more recent data, they calculated that a single cigarette will shave twenty minutes off the life of the average person. The findings emphasize the importance of quitting smoking as soon as possible, the researchers say.

Lots of studies and tragic anecdotes have confirmed it the death of cigarette smoke. Smoking can damage almost all organs and increase the risk of lifelong health problems, such as emphysema, heart disease, and cancers of the lungs and mouth, to name a few. But the UCL researchers wanted to better quantify the damage of smoking to our lives with the most current data available.

A 2000 study of British smokers estimated that each cigarette costs a person about 11 minutes of life on average. This estimate was based on assumptions derived from data on men only, however, such as studies that followed the average age of male smokers at death compared to non-smokers. This time, the UCL researchers were also able to analyze the data of women smokers in the United Kingdom. They also analyzed the most recent data on the mortality of British men with data on how many cigarettes per day they smoke today on average.

Overall, after adjusting for other factors, such as a person’s wealth, the researchers estimated that people who never quit smoking lost about 10 to 11 years off their life expectancy relative to a non-smoker. smoker – higher than the previous estimate of 6.5 years of life lost. They also estimated that each cigarette costs 20 minutes of life on average – 17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women.

Most of these stolen minutes, the researchers note, are taken from a person’s middle and healthy years, rather than at the end of their life. In other words, smokers are likely to experience the usual health problems of aging for the same duration, but reach that stage earlier. For example, researchers have highlighted that a 60-year-old smoker is expected to have the typical health of a 70-year-old non-smoker.

“This is time that could have been spent in relatively good health,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published Sunday in the newspaper Addiction.

The findings are still dependent on some assumptions about the harms of cigarette smoke – harms that are not evenly distributed among everyone. For example, not all smokers develop lung cancer. Cigarettes these days contain even less tar than they did decades agoso smokers today might be exposed to fewer toxins than before. That said, cigarettes “low tar” does not seem substantially lower than people risk of cancer or other problems (one reason why it could be that smokers often take bigger puffs to get more nicotine).

Fortunately, people in general are smoking less than ever before, which has helped contribute to reducing cancer cases and deaths. But smoking and secondhand smoke is always esteemed to help cause nearly half a million deaths in the United States alone each year. Although the damage from smoking can be a permanent shortening of life, it’s still worth quitting no matter how old you are, say researchers. But the sooner he leaves you, the better.

“Quitting smoking at any age is beneficial, but the sooner smokers get off this death ladder, the longer and healthier they can expect their lives to be,” they wrote.