It's never too late to quit

Kicking the smoking habit can add years to a person's life even after lung disease has set in, proving it is almost never too late to quit, US and Canadian researchers reported this week.

They found the death rate was cut nearly in half among middle-aged heavy smokers who managed to quit with the help of an anti-smoking programme.

"I think most people know that it's unhealthy for them, but they don't appreciate how much their life can be improved by quitting," Dr Robert Wise of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.

Researchers studied 5887 people aged 35 to 60 who had chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.

Half were put into a quit-smoking programme involving a lecture from a doctor, behaviour workshops and nicotine gum. The other half were told smoking was harmful but got no other special treatment.

After five years, 22 per cent of those in the programme had given up, compared with 5 per cent of those not given help.

After 14 years, 731 of those people in the study had died - 33 per cent from lung cancer, 22 per cent from heart disease or stroke and 7.8 per cent as a result of respiratory disease.

"Death from lung cancer was roughly two times more common in current smokers than in sustained quitters," said researchers in the report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers found the death rate overall fell by 15 per cent in the group that got the quit-smoking coaching, but by 46 per cent in those who managed to give up smoking for five years or more. Smoking is blamed for killing 440,000 people a year in the United States alone. The US Government estimates 46 million adults, or 22.5 per cent of the population, smoke and 26 per cent of high school seniors smoke.

- REUTERS