It’s never too late to quit smoking

THE ESSENTIAL

• It’s World No Tobacco Day on May 31.
• New research shows that quitting smoking even two years before you are diagnosed with lung cancer improves your chances of survival.
• The researchers plan to integrate their results into a pilot smoking cessation assistance program.

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On World No Tobacco Day, a new study is encouraging smokers who want to quit. Results presented for the American Society of Cancer Oncology (ASCO), the largest US congress on cancer, show that it is never too late to quit smoking. Indeed, quitting smoking even two years before the diagnosis of lung cancer reduces the chances of death by 12%.

To arrive at this happy conclusion, an international team of researchers crossed data from 17 different studies conducted by the International Lung Cancer Consortium. A total of 36,000 people with lung cancer were followed. Among them, about 47% smoked at the time of diagnosis, 30% had already stopped and 23% had never smoked.

After analysis, the researchers found that those who had quit smoking less than two years before being diagnosed were 12% less likely to die after the discovery of cancer than those who had continued to smoke. When smoking cessation took place between two and five years before diagnosis, the reduction in the risk of death even increased to 16%. Finally, for those who had given up smoking more than 5 years before, this decreased by 20%. Last but not least, the benefits of quitting were slightly greater in patients who had smoked at least 20 cigarettes a day for more than 30 years, so heavy smokers.

“Stop smoking now”

“This research shows that if you smoke and quit, no matter what the time, you are more likely to survive than someone who continues to smoke. The message of the study is therefore simple: quit smoking now ”, summarizes the main author of this work, Dr. Aline Fusco Fares, (Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Ontario). The researchers plan to integrate this data into a pilot program to help people quit smoking.

“Improvements in survival seen even when quitting shortly before the diagnosis of lung cancer shows that it is never too late to quit smoking ”concluded Howard A. Burris, President of ASCO, which runs May 29-31, virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This study is not the first to highlight the long-term health benefits of smoking cessation, even for people who have smoked for years. Last August, an American study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed for example that in people who quit smoking permanently, the cardiovascular benefits are felt as early as five years after weaning. From there, the risk drops on average by 39% and becomes almost equivalent to that of people who have stopped smoking for 10 or 15 years, regardless of age.

Tobacco kills nearly 7 million people each year

Worldwide, tobacco kills nearly 7 million people each year, including more than 6 million smokers and ex-smokers and more than 890,000 people exposed to second-hand smoke. In 2015, it resulted in 75,000 premature deaths in France. Tobacco is a risk factor in the development of cardiovascular diseases (myocardial infarction, heart failure, etc.), cancers (of course of the lungs, but also of the stomach, esophagus or even the pancreas) and chronic diseases. like asthma and erectile dysfunction.

Besides physical illness, smokers are also more likely to develop or worsen mental health problems such as depression or nervous disorders. Finally, smoking has a considerable impact on quality of life (sleep problems, difficult physical exertion …) and physical appearance (facial wrinkles are more marked, complexion more gray, teeth more damaged …).

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