Women Benefit Soon After Quitting Cigarettes

Approximately 40 million Americans currently smoke cigarettes, though more and more of them are considering or trying to quit. The motivation to kick the habit can come from family members, lifestyle changes, or health warnings, and if it is the latter, researchers have concluded that there are even more reasons for people - especially women - to quit now.

The bottom line is that women who stop smoking cigarettes will see major health improvements and benefits within the first five years. The risk of death from all causes, including heart and vascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, and lung cancer, was reduced significantly in women who quit, and those risks could be completely negated after 20 or 30 years, as if they never smoked at all.

Published in the May 7th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the study was conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health. Its author, Stacey A. Kenfield, noted that the harms of smoking can be reversed, and the sooner a person can stop smoking, the better it is with respect to all aspects of the person's health.

The study looked at more than 100,000 American women in the nursing profession whose health histories were first recorded in 1976 and tracked through subsequent years until 2004. The women were between the ages of 30 and 55 at the start of the study, and participants completed detailed health questionnaires every two years throughout the period of the study. A total of 12,483 deaths occurred in the group, with 29 percent being current smokers and 35 percent being past smokers. The harshest findings were that 64 percent of deaths in current smokers and 2 percent of deaths in past smokers were attributed in some way to smoking. Additional aspects to the study showed that there is a specific relationship between smoking and colorectal cancer in women, though more detailed studies will need to be conducted to obtain further information.

Most of the findings were encouraging. Women who stopped smoking experienced a 13 percent reduction in the risk of death from all causes. In the area of respiratory diseases, there was an 18% reduction within 5 to 10 years of quitting, and regarding coronary diseases, there was a 21 percent lessening of the risk of death. Lung cancer risks took longer than any other to disappear - as long as 30 years - but the decrease in the risk of actual death was 21 percent in the first 5 years.

Women who began smoking later in life, specifically after age 25, had a much lower risk of being diagnosed with heart and lung diseases, but previous studies have shown that the majority of women take up the habit at earlier ages, typically younger than 18-years of age. And current smokers have almost triple the risk of death from any number of diseases than women who never smoked.

"Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of deaths in the United States," the report stated. "Globally, approximately 5 million premature deaths were attributable to smoking in 2000. The World Health Organization projects by 2030 that tobacco-attributable deaths will annually account for 3 million deaths in industrialized countries and 7 million in developing countries."

Those are numbers for thought. With more studies showing that quitting smoking can immediately reduce the risk of illness and death, and time can decrease those risks even more, it might be time to consider a positive and health life change, and clean those ashtrays for the last time.