A new smoking study has some encouraging results for current smokers who want to quit.
The study says if you quit smoking by the time you are 44, you can live as long as someone who never smoked.
John Thompson has been a smoker for many years. "I started when I was 13-years-old. I'm 52 now, so it's been quite a while." He says he's smoked nearly two packs a day for the last 40 years and he knows he needs to quit.
A new study from the University of Toronto is giving him a lot of encouragement to do it sooner, rather than later. "It definitely encourages me with all the other reinforcement that's it's been bad for you. I quite for about a month and I was starting to see a difference already. But I ended up picking it back up again. It's not one of those easy things to kick."
The study, which came out earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, says people who quit smoking by the time they are 44, die on average just one year sooner than someone who never smoked. It also says people who quit smoking at 54 die just four years sooner than the average non-smoker. The study also found that lifetime smokers live, on average, 10 years fewer than people who never pick up the habit.
Thompson says quitting won't be easy. "Like I've been smoking for 40 years. It's not going to happen, 40 years of smoking damage is not going to happen over night. It's not going to happen in a year. But I'm obviously going in the right direction. It's obviously going to start healing itself."
If you would like to read more about this study, click here:
http://www.dlsph.utoronto.ca/page/dr-prabat-jah-smoking-hazards-and-cessation-benefits-us-21st-century
