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New Study Reveals Long-Term Smoking Effects On Women

Lizzie Pereira |
October 30, 2012 | 11:52 p.m. PDT

Staff Reporter

While smoking became popular for women in the 1940s, it is only now that the prolonged effects have been found. (Creative Commons/Flickr)
While smoking became popular for women in the 1940s, it is only now that the prolonged effects have been found. (Creative Commons/Flickr)

While it is nothing new that smoking is bad for your health, a new study reveals long-term effects on women and just how much longer they can live if they kick the habit.

The study, published in “The Lancet,” enlisted over one million women in the UK from 1996 to 2001, ranging from ages 50 to 65. When the study began, 20 percent of the women were smokers, 28 percent were former smokers, and 52 percent were non-smokers. 

Each participant completed a questionnaire, indicating her lifestyle, medical status and social factors. They were resurveyed three and eight years later. By 2011, 66,000 of the women had died. 

According to researchers, these women born around 1940 were the first generation of women in which many smoked significant amounts of cigarettes throughout their lives. Therefore it is only now that the full effects of prolonged smoking can be determined. 

The results indicated that those who were still smokers after the first three years were almost three times more likely to die in the next nine years than non-smokers. 

But most importantly, researchers concluded that stopping smoking had more benefits than had been previously suggested. They found that those who quit before age 40 lowered their risk of earlier death by 90 percent. Quitting before age 30 lowered the risk by 97 percent.

According to Professor Sir Richard Peto, co-author of the study from the University of Oxford, UK, “If women smoke like men, they die like men – but, whether they are men or women, smokers who stop before reaching middle age will on average gain about an extra ten years of life.”  

The study also concluded that smokers were more likely to develop health issues directly related to their smoking habits, dying from diseases like stroke, lung disease or cancer, or heart disease. 

Reach Staff Reporter Lizzie Pereira here


 

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