Cutting back on smoking may not increase lifespan
You may be fooling yourself if you think that reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke will protect you from the health risks caused by smoking, new research published in the American Journal of Epidemiology suggest.
For the study, researchers from the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, tracked two groups of smokers – the first included 1 524 working people who were tracked from the 1970s (when they were in their 40s, 50s and 60s) to 2010, and the other group included 3 730 people from the general population who were tracked for more or less the same period of time.
The researchers found no difference overall in death rates between those who smoked and those who only cut down. In one of the studies, they found a lifespan benefit for those who cut down, but only among those who smoked 21 or more cigarettes per day.
“These inconclusive results support the view that reducing cigarette consumption should not be promoted as a means of reducing mortality, although it may have a valuable role as a step toward smoking cessation,” the researchers wrote.
It remains clear that quitting itself is a good idea. The study found that smokers who quit were 25 to 34 percent less likely to die over the period of the research.
“Quit between ages 25 and 34 and save 10 years of life; between 35 and 44, save nine years; quit between 45 and 54, gain six years; quit between 55 and 64, gain four years,” Dr Steve Schroeder, a professor of medicine at the University of California said in a HealthDay News report.
“Many of the immediate effects [from quitting smoking] come from reduced cardiovascular disease, which is sensitive to very low smoking exposure,” he said.
“The main, and possibly only, benefit from reducing cigarette intake is that it makes it easier to quit subsequently,” he said. “It also reduces the exposure of others to secondhand smoke.”
The authors of the study say medical officials shouldn’t promote cutting down unless they understand its potential benefits.
Source: HealthDay News
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Cutting back on smoking may not increase lifespan
by healthe, Health-e News
July 23, 2013