Each cigarette costs you 20 minutes of life, new research warns

Here are some additional motivations for anyone looking to quit smoking as part of their New Year’s resolutions. Research published this week shows that every cigarette you smoke shortens your life by about half an hour.

Scientists from University College London have carried out a study that updates previous estimates of how life-threatening smoking can be. Based on more recent data, they calculated that one cigarette would shave about twenty minutes off the average person’s life. The researchers say the findings highlight the importance of quitting smoking as soon as possible.

Many studies and tragic anecdotes have confirmed this smoking is deadly. Smoking can damage almost every organ and increase the risk of life-threatening health problems such as emphysema, heart disease, and lung and oral cancer. But UCL researchers wanted to use the most up-to-date data available to better measure the damage smoking does to our lifespan.

A study of British smokers in 2000 is estimated Each cigarette costs a person an average of 11 minutes of life. This estimate was based on assumptions from data on men only, such as studies that tracked the average age at death of men who smoked compared to nonsmokers. This time, the UCL researchers were also able to analyze data from women smokers in England. They also analyzed more recent data on the death of British men and data on how many cigarettes people smoke per day on average today.

Overall, after taking into account other factors such as a person’s wealth, the researchers estimated that people who never quit smoking lost about 10 to 11 years of life expectancy compared to nonsmokers, which was 6.5 years higher than previous estimates. They also calculated that each cigarette costs an average of 20 minutes – 17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women.

Most of these stolen minutes occur during the middle and healthy years of a person’s life, not later in life, the researchers note. In other words, smokers experience the usual health problems for the same amount of time, but reach this stage sooner. As an example, the researchers noted that a 60-year-old lifetime smoker would be expected to have the typical health of a 70-year-old non-smoker.

“This is time that is likely to be spent in relatively good health,” the researchers wrote in their paper. has been published Sunday in the magazine Addiction.

The findings still rely on some assumptions about the harms of smoking—harms that are not distributed equally among everyone. For example, not every smoker will develop lung cancer. These days, cigarettes contain less resin than they do decades agotherefore, smokers today may be exposed to fewer toxins than in the past. That is, “low resin” cigarettes are not visible significantly lower people risk of cancer or other problems (one reason may be that smokers take larger breaths to get more nicotine).

Thankfully, people in general are smoking less than ever before, which has helped reduce cancer cases and deaths. But cigarettes and secondhand smoke still guessing contributing to the deaths of nearly half a million people each year in the United States alone. Researchers say that even though smoking can permanently shorten your life, it’s worth quitting no matter what your age. But the sooner you get out, the better off you’ll be.

“Quitting smoking is beneficial at any age, but the sooner smokers get off this death escalator, the longer and healthier they can expect to live,” they wrote.