CIGARETTE smokers are being urged to heed new research out of the UK, which shows that every cigarette smoked, on average, can take around 20 minutes off their life expectancy.
Researchers at University College London estimated the loss of life expectancy per cigarette is approximately 17 minutes for men and 22 for women, after taking into account socioeconomic status and other factors.
The study, which was published last week in the journal Addiction, found that on average, people who smoked throughout their lives shaved around a decade off their lifespan compared with people who never smoked.
"Twenty cigarettes at twenty minutes per cigarette works out to be almost seven hours of life lost per pack," said Dr. Sarah Jackson, lead author of the paper and a principal research fellow in the UCL Alcohol and Tobacco Research Group.
"The time they're losing is time that they could be spending with their loved ones in fairly good health," she pointed out.
"With smoking, it doesn't eat into the later period of your life that tends to be lived in poorer health.
"Rather, it seems to erode some relatively healthier section in the middle of life.
"So when we're talking about loss of life expectancy, life expectancy would tend to be lived in relatively good health," Jackson added.
The new data from the UK suggests 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.
People who quit in their twenties or early thirties tend to have a similiar life expectancy to people who have never smoked, according to Jackson, who added, "but no matter how old you are when you quit, you will always have a longer life expectancy than if you had continued to smoke".
In their research paper, Jackson and her colleagues wrote that a person smoking 10 cigarettes per day who quits smoking on 01 Jan could prevent the loss of a full day of life by 08 Jan, a full week of life by 20 Feb, and a full month by 05 Aug, and by the end of the year, would have avoided losing 50 days of life expectancy. JM
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