“If a woman smokes as much as a man, she will live as much as a man. But, regardless of whether he is a smoker, a man or a woman, if he quit smoking before he reaches middle age, he saved himself an extra ten years of his life” - said researcher Christine Peary of the University of Oxford in the UK. And recent large-scale studies with her participation confirm this.
It turned out: cigarette smoking can simply "shave off" for ten years from a woman’s life. But if you drop to 40, then the risk of dying is reduced by more than 90%. If you quit smoking before 30, the risk is reduced by 97%. This conclusion was reached after the results of the Million Women Study. It was conducted by "The Lancet" - one of the most famous, oldest and most authoritative general journals in medicine.
The study studied more than a million women aged fifty to sixty nine years. The questionnaire included questions about their lifestyle and attitude to smoking, and the answers were entered into the database. Three years later, the survey was repeated, and life expectancy was monitored for another nine years.
The result of the research was joyless: 66,000 deaths.
When the study had just begun, those participating in it were divided into several categories. 20% of women smoked, 28% successfully quit, and 52% never had this bad habit. Further results showed: those who continued to smoke toward the three-year mark were three times closer to death in the next nine years than their non-smoking "colleagues."
Such a “triple” calculation means: two-thirds of all deaths of smokers at the turn of their 50s, 60s and 70s were due to diseases caused by cigarettes. These include cancer and chronic lung diseases, as well as heart disease leading to stroke.
The more women smoke, the higher the risk of their mortality. Even “light smokers,” who allow themselves one to five or nine cigarettes a day, risk twice as much death as non-smokers.
"Million Women Study" is not the first, but the most ambitious study, which allows you to fully monitor the effects of smoking in women born around 1940. To accept it on faith or not is up to you. But it's never too late to quit smoking. Especially if at stake are as much as ten years of life.
