One cigarette shortens life expectancy by twenty minutes, research shows
Smokers are being urged to kick the habit by 2025 after a new assessment of the harms of cigarettes found that cigarettes shorten life expectancy even more than doctors thought.
Researchers from University College London found that on average a single cigarette takes about 20 minutes off a person’s life, meaning a typical pack of 20 cigarettes can shorten a person’s life by almost seven hours.
According to the analysis, a smoker who smokes ten cigarettes a day on January 1 could avoid losing a full day of life on January 8. They could increase their life expectancy by a week if they quit until February 5 and by a whole month if they quit until August 5. By the end of the year, they had avoided losing 50 days of their lives, the assessment found.
“People generally know that smoking is harmful, but they tend to underestimate how much,” says Dr Sarah Jackson, lead researcher at UCL’s Alcohol and Tobacco Research Group. “On average, smokers who don’t quit lose about ten years of their life. That’s 10 years of precious time, life moments and milestones with loved ones.”
Smoking is one of the leading preventable causes of disease and death in the world, killing up to two-thirds of long-term users. It causes around 80,000 deaths a year in Britain and a quarter of all cancer deaths in England.
The study, commissioned by the Ministry of Health, is based on the latest data from the US Department of Health British medical studywhich began in 1951 as one of the world’s first major studies into the effects of smoking, and the Million women studywhich has been tracking women’s health since 1996.
While an earlier review in the BMJ in 2000 showed that on average a single cigarette shortened life expectancy by about eleven minutes, according to the latest analysis published in the Journal of Addiction almost doubles the figure to 20 minutes – 17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women.
“Some people may think they don’t mind missing a few years of life, since old age is often marked by chronic illness or disability. But smoking does not shorten the unhealthy period at the end of life,” Jackson told the Guardian. “It mainly eats away at the relatively healthy years of middle age, bringing forward the onset of poor health. This means that a 60-year-old smoker generally has the health profile of a 70-year-old non-smoker.”
Although some smokers live long lives, others develop smoking-related diseases and even die from them in their 40s. The variation is caused by differences in smoking habits, such as the type of cigarette used, the number of puffs taken and how deeply smokers inhale. People also differ in how susceptible they are to the toxins in cigarette smoke.
The authors emphasize that smokers must quit completely to reap the full benefits for health and life expectancy. Previous work has shown this to be the case not a safe level of smoking: The risk of heart disease and stroke is only about 50% lower for people who smoke one cigarette per day, compared to those who smoke twenty per day. “Quitting smoking at any age is beneficial, but the sooner smokers get off this escalator of death, the longer and healthier they can expect their lives to be,” they write.
The Department of Health said smokers can find advice, support and resources in the NHS Quit Smoking app and the online Personal Quit Plan, which tailors its advice to the individual’s preferences.
Professor Sanjay Agrawal, Special Adviser on Tobacco at the Royal College of Physicians, said: “Every cigarette smoked costs precious minutes of life, and the cumulative impact is devastating, not just for individuals but also for our healthcare system and our economy. This research is a powerful reminder of the urgent need to tackle cigarette smoking as the leading preventable cause of death and disease in Britain.”