An international group of researchers has identified the age at which smoking should be stopped to best avoid the risk of death. Find out when is the ideal time.
- In France, tobacco is responsible for more than 75,000 deaths per year.
- The risk of developing a disease is related to the number of cigarettes smoked each day, but especially to the duration during which one smoked.
Smokers who quit before age 35 have a mortality rate similar to that of people who have never smoked. This was revealed by American, British and Malaysian scientists. To reach this conclusion, they carried out a study, the results of which were published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Dangers of cigarettes: data from 551,388 smokers examined
As part of this work, researchers attempted to determine the dangers of smoking and the benefits of quitting smoking by sex and age. For this, they used data from the US National Health Interview Survey collected between January 1997 and December 2018 from adults aged 25 to 84 at the time of enrollment. The participants were followed until December 31, 2019. In total, the information of 551,388 people was analyzed. The team took into account their smoking status, age when they started smoking and quitting smoking.
Tobacco: 35 years old would be the ideal age to quit smoking
According to the results, 74,870 deaths were recorded during the follow-up, more precisely 36,792 (49.1%) in men and 38,078 (50.9%) in women. “Current smoking was associated with an all-cause mortality rate at least twice as high as never smoking,” can we read in the searches. Quitting smoking before age 35 was linked to reductions in excess mortality associated with continued smoking, particularly among people who started smoking young. According to the authors, quitting smoking between the ages of 35 and 44 would raise the mortality rate to 21% and to 47% between the ages of 45 and 54.
