It’s easy to fantasize about being Jessica Alba or Brad Pitt with a cigarette dangling loosely from your lips. Or to distract yourself from that cheesecake calling from the fridge. But smoking kills. And the odds are getting uglier for some of us faster than we’d like to think.
When Grandma started puffing away in the 1950s, she was three times more likely to die from lung cancer as her non-smoking girlfriends. But women today have come a long way, baby. Those who smoke are 25 times more at risk. They now face the same dismal odds as their cigarette-sporting male friends. Smoking has become an equal-opportunity killer, a new study of two million American women in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms.
We’re not just pulling a cool image out of cigarette packs. We’re pulling out fatal cancers, lung disease, heart disease and strokes.
But the good news, as the Star’s Joe Hall reports, is that smokers can cheat the Grim Reaperby butting out. Smoking statistically chops 10 years off a person’s life. However, those who quit by the time they turn 30 have “pretty much the same survival curves” as people who have never smoked, says Dr. Prabhat Jha, who heads the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
His research, also featured in the journal, indicates that even those who quit by 40 can gain back nine of those years. While smokers remain at high risk for lung cancer, quitting at 40 cuts down the chances of dying from heart attacks, strokes and the like.
“The message really is, it’s best to quit as early as possible,” says Jha. “But if you can’t, quitting at any age will have benefits.”
Make the Reaper wait. Sounds like the title of a Hollywood hit that anyone can star in, just by butting out.
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