Kicking the smoking habit can add years to a person’s life even after lung disease has set in, further demonstrating it is almost never too late to quit, U.S. and Canadian researchers reported on Monday.
They found the death rate was cut nearly in half among middle-aged heavy smokers who managed to quit with the help of a targeted intervention program.
“I think most people know that it’s unhealthy for them, but I think people don’t appreciate how much their life can be improved by quitting,” Dr. Robert Wise of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said in a statement.
Wise, who helped lead the study, and colleagues at 10 clinics studied 5,887 people aged 35 to 60 who had chronic pulmonary obstructive disease but who did not consider themselves ill.
People with COPD have impaired breathing, and it is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.
Half were put into a quit-smoking program involving a strong lecture from a doctor, behavior modification workshops and nicotine gum. The other half were told smoking was harmful but got other no special treatment.
The study showed just how difficult it is to quit. After five years, 22 percent of those in the program managed to quit for a long time, compared with 5 percent of those not given help.
“We found that with this intervention, about one out of five people could quit continuously for five years, but that 30 percent of the people could quit on and off throughout the five-year period,” Wise said.
After 14 1/2 years, 731 of the people in the program had died — 33 percent of lung cancer, 22 percent of heart disease or stroke and 7.8 percent of respiratory disease.
“In our study, death from lung cancer was roughly 2.2 times more common in current smokers than in sustained quitters,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The researchers found the death rate overall fell by 15 percent in the group that got the quit-smoking coaching, but by 46 percent in those who managed to quit smoking for five years or more.
Smoking is blamed for killing 440,000 people a year in the United States alone. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 46 million adults, or 22.5 percent of the population, smoke and 26 percent of high school seniors smoke.
