Quit smoking at 35 for 8 years more life – but what if you're 75?

A new study has found that, whether you do it at 35 or 75, quitting cigarette smoking will add years to your life. The findings go to prove that you’re never too old to reap the benefits of stopping smoking.

For as long as cigarette smoking has been linked to cancer, stroke, and heart and lung disease, quit-smoking campaigns have urged people to kick the habit as a way of improving their health. But the focus has predominantly been on getting younger folks to stop smoking ‘before it’s too late’. New research by the University of Michigan School of Public Health has found that you’ll live longer regardless of the age at which you quit.

“We have seen a remarkable decline in young adult smoking over the past decade,” said Thuy Le, PhD, who conducted the study with co-investigators David Mendez, PhD, and Kenneth Warner, PhD. “However, rates among older adults who smoke have remained stagnant and to our knowledge, no research had established benefits for them of quitting. We wanted to show that stopping smoking is beneficial at any age and provide [an] incentive for older people who smoke to quit.”

The researchers calculated age-specific death rates by smoking status – people who never smoked, those who currently smoked, and those who’d smoked previously but quit – using the relative risks of all-cause mortality, using data from a range of national US sources. This information was used to create ‘life tables’ that showed peoples’ life expectancies in 10-year intervals between the ages of 35 and 75.

They found that compared to people who’d never smoked, those who currently smoked and had smoked through adulthood up to age 35, 45, 55, 65, or 75 will lose, on average, 9.1, 8.3, 7.3, 5.9 and 4.4 years of life, respectively, if they continued to smoke for the rest of their lives. However, if they quit smoking at each of these ages, they’d avoid an average loss of 8.0, 5.6, 3.4, 1.7, and 0.7 years, respectively. Among those who quit at 65, the chance of gaining at least one year of life was 23.4%; for quitting at 75, the chance was 14.2%. Those are pretty decent chances.

Additionally, the data showed that almost 10% of people who quit smoking at 65 gained at least eight years of life compared to those who kept smoking, and 8% of those who quit by 75 gained at least four years.

“The cessation benefit is not limited to young and middle-aged adults who smoke; this study demonstrates its applicability to seniors as well,” said Warner. “While the gains from quitting at older ages may seem low in absolute terms, they represent a large proportion of an individual’s remaining life expectancy.”

The researchers hope that clinicians can use the study as scientific evidence to convince their patients, particularly their older patients, who smoke to quit.

The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Source: Elsevier