Tobacco Related Deaths For Women Cut By 97% If They Quit Before Age Of 30
Well, if there was ever a reason for women to quit smoking this definitely is some news that they should take to heart. As study author Sir Richard Peto from the Oxford University says:
“If women smoke like men, they die like men,” said Peto. “But whether they are men or women, smokers who stop before reaching middle-age will on average gain about an extra 10 years of life.”
The data used by Peto and his research team came from the Million Women Study which recruited 1.3 million women between 1996 and 2001 when they underwent breast cancer screening and were aged between 50 and 65. The large number of women involved allowed the researchers to compile a vast amount of information about women’s health and led to some important findings, especially in regards to breast cancer.
Persistent smokers were more likely to die over the course of the study, almost three times as likely; and results showed that two-thirds of all deaths of smokers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s was caused by smoking – not just due to cancer but also other smoking related illnesses. They also found that the age at which women began smoking also played an important role with those that picked it up at an early age increased the length for which they smoked and their risk of an early death.
Although stopping well before the age of 40 will substantially reduce women’s risk of dying early, “this does not mean … that it is safe to smoke until age 40 years and then stop, for women who do so have throughout the next few decades a mortality rate 1.2 times that of never-smokers,” says the paper. “This is a substantial excess risk, causing one in six of the deaths among these ex-smokers.”
via Guardian
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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