You are never too old to give up cigarettes says new study

We probably all know a person who has been smoking for the majority of their life and says something similar to ‘I have smoked all my life, what’s the point in stopping now!’ However, it is never too late to permanently stub out according to researchers from Germany, after a new study published in the June 11 edition of the ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’, found a strong connection between smoking cessation and a reduced risk of death.
There are already a lot of widely known benefits to stopping smoking. These include things such as:

. Increase your fertility levels and the chance of having a healthy baby.
. Reduce the risk of your children developing asthma, bronchitis, meningitis, etc.
. Not exposing those around you to harmful second hand smoke.
. Reduce the risk of you developing lung cancer, heart disease.
. An improvement to skin, nails and teeth.
In addition, there may be some facts that you didn’t know in relation to smoking and just how detrimental it is to your health and well-being:

. Each cigarette has more than 4,000 different chemicals inside and the majority of them are harmful to the body.
. Over 60 of the harmful chemicals can cause cancer.
. Some studies have shown a positive link between smoking and baldness. A 2007 Taiwanese study claimed that smokers who lit up more than 20 cigarettes each day were more than twice as likely to have moderate or severe hair loss compared to people who had never smoked.
. Nicotine slows down your body’s ability to heal itself by dehydrating your skin.
. Some scientists say that the average smoker will lose 14 years of their life because of smoking.
. Sugar approximates to about 20% of a cigarette and many diabetics are unaware of this fact.

The latest study regarding the effects of smoking was carried out by the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg. The team of researchers, led by Carolin Gellert, studied information garnered from 17 separate studies which were published between the years 1987 to 2011, spanning  across 7 countries.  The total number of participants in the studies ranged from 863 to 877,243.

In all studies, in comparison to those who had never smoked, a higher all-case death was discovered with current smokers. A huge 83% heightened relative mortality was determined for current smokers, with a 34% increase for former smokers.

The researchers noted that benefits were evident with smoking cessation even within the oldest participants in the study, some being over 80 years of age. They also say the results were similar for both men and women.

An editorial was written with the study, provided by Tai Hing Lamb, MD, from the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. In the editorial he writes, “Many older smokers misbelieve that they are too old to quit or too old to benefit from quitting. Because of reverse causality and from seeing deaths of old friends who had quit recently, some misbelieve that quitting could be harmful. A simple, direct, strong, and evidence-based warning is needed.”