On average, a single cigarette takes 20 minutes off a person’s life, according to a new study published at University College London. To put that into perspective, a pack of 20 cigarettes can shorten a person’s life expectancy by seven hours.
The estimated shortened life expectancy is more than what researchers first predicted in 2000, when they found that a cigarette can shorten a smoker's life expectancy by an average of 11 minutes. The data published in Addiction follow up on the 2000 study published in BMJ. It draws from data from the British Doctors Study, which started in 1951 as one of the largest studies looking at the effects of smoking. It also pulls from data from the Million Women Study.
“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,” Dr. Sarah Jackson, a principal research fellow in the UCL Alcohol and Tobacco Research Group and lead author of the paper, told CNN. “So when we’re talking about loss of life expectancy, life expectancy would tend to be lived in relatively good health.”
Notably, the study found that when people quit smoking earlier in life they have the same life expectancy as people who have never smoked. However, when people quit later in life, it’s harder for them to regain the time lost to smoking.
“But as you get older, you progressively lose a little bit more that you then can’t regain by quitting,” Jackson said. “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. So, in effect, while you may not be reversing the life lost already, you’re preventing further loss of life expectancy.”
While smoking rates have declined over the 2000s, it remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States. In 2022, the CDC estimated 28.8 million of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes.
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