Quitting smoking before age 35 equals risk of death with non-smokers

While learning, humans make many mistakes.

For a time, as with most startups, those mistakes are easier to fix, and the same goes for your health.

Bad habits, at least early in life, can be reversed, reducing long-term damage to that of an aging person after a healthy existence.

This is the conclusion of many studies that have tried to calculate the moment when quitting smoking can equal, in the long term, the health risk of someone who smoked as a young person and that of someone who has never smoked.

In the last of these works, in which information was collected from more than half a million people in the US and has been published in

, it has been calculated that people who stop smoking before the age of 35 have, in the long term, a mortality risk similar to that of people who have never smoked.

From then on, although there are always benefits from giving up tobacco, former smokers already have disadvantages compared to those who never smoked.

As the authors explain, smoking cessation before age 45 is associated with reductions of about 90% in excess risk of mortality compared with those who continue to smoke and 66% when smoking cessation is achieved before age 64.

In the same study, which has collected information from 1997 to 2018, among people aged 25 to 84, it is estimated that, compared to people who have never smoked, those who smoke today multiply total mortality by three, in the case of the population white, and double it, in the case of the black or Hispanic population.

The authors, led by Blake Thompson, of the American Cancer Society in Georgia (USA), calculate that "if we assume that the associations in this report are causal, more than 40% of the deaths of those who smoked at some point in his life and 60% of current smokers could be attributed to tobacco.

Among the main problems that would be reduced would be deaths from cancer, cardiovascular or respiratory.

The results are similar to those of other similar works that have tried to estimate the reversible damage of tobacco by advancing the moment of quitting.

A study conducted with more than a million women in the United Kingdom and published in

calculated that quitting smoking before the age of 40 reduced the risk of death associated with tobacco by 90% and reduced it almost to zero if it was done before of the 30s

Joan Soriano, a scientist at the Hospital de la Princesa Health Research Institute (Madrid), explains that there are multiple mechanisms by which tobacco harms, "because when you smoke you inhale nicotine and 4,000 other substances" and "when you quit smoking that exposure ceases” and, with it, “the direct damage of nicotine, acute inflammation, the accumulation of heavy metals and oncotoxic materials or the shortening of telomeres.

Exploring how these mechanisms are initiated and reversed "is very relevant, but very difficult", acknowledges Soriano, who adds that this research "does not explore the mechanisms, but rather the consequences of smoking and the benefits of quitting".

The most important thing, believes the expert, is that the damage begins with the first cigarette smoked and accumulates over the years and the packs smoked,

For the experts, in any case, it is important to emphasize that this does not mean that a young person can smoke without consequences until a certain age, since the damage occurs at all ages.

Esteve Fernández, director of the Tobacco Control Unit of the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO), Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona), does believe that these data can be used positively to show the benefits of quitting smoking at any age.

"There are factors that are noticeable very quickly, such as stopping coughing, but also in a year the risk of heart attack is reduced by half, which is something that may not be noticed directly."

In addition, from an age in which you begin to have more diseases, quitting smoking is also positive.

"There are cancer patients to whom some doctors do not ask them to stop smoking because they already have that disease, but we know that a patient with any disease reduces the risk of surgery, because smoking worsens healing, or radiotherapy, for example, it works worse, because the irrigation of the tissues is worse”, says Fernández, also a professor of Public Health at the University of Barcelona.

The figures of the damage caused by tobacco are enormous.

A 2018 study estimated that in Spain, each year, smoking steals more than a million years of life from its inhabitants.

However, as Soriano points out, "the smoker is not to blame but rather the victim of a very powerful and influential tobacco industry and it uses tactics to maintain and increase its market share, incorporating smokers to replace those it loses."

Other experts, such as Luis Paz-Ares, head of oncology at the 12 de Octubre Hospital in Madrid and a former smoker, frequently recall that treating smoking as a vice should be avoided and access "to smoking cessation treatments, to drugs and clinics that can help get it”, something that now, according to him, is not even done with people who urgently need it,

like people who have just had a heart attack.

Studies like the one just published show that quitting smoking and quitting as soon as possible has enormous health benefits and any support to achieve it will have direct effects on public health.

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