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 at about 17 minutes for men and 22 for women, they wrote in an editorial published in the journal Addiction.
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,” said Dr. Sarah Jackson, a principal research fellow in the UCL Alcohol and Tobacco Research Group and lead author of the paper.
The time they’re losing is time that they could be spending with their loved ones in fairly good health,” Jackson said.
“With smoking, it doesn’t eat into the later period of your life that tends to lead to poorer health. Rather, it seems to erode some relatively healthier sections in the middle of life,” she said. So when we’re talking about loss of life expectancy, life expectancy would tend to be lived in relatively 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.
Overall, the new data from the UK indicates that the harm caused by smoking appears to be cumulative. And the amount of life expectancy that can be recovered by quitting may depend on several factors, such as age and how long someone has smoked.
Source: CNN
