Smoking Takes 10 Years of Life -- But Quitting Gets Them Back

It's undeniable that smoking is bad for your health. It can yellow teeth, cause cancer, raise blood pressure and cause heart disease. Both men and women are affected equally, in fact. Two large surveys found that women are now just as likely to die from tobacco-related disease as men.

However, there is hope. Quitting smoking by 40 restores life expectancy to near normal, according to a new analysis of the health survey and death record data from the U.S. Prabhat Jha, a professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, and colleagues analyzed the data and reported their findings in the online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM. However, the researchers cautioned that their recent analysis does not mean that it is safe to smoke until that time and then quit. In addition, the study confirmed that smoking tends to take an average of ten years off of people's lives wherever they live in the world.

Jha and colleagues analyzed smoking-cessation histories from over 200,000 men and women aged 25 and older who were interviewed between 1997 and 2004 as part of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey. Using death records, they then related the survey data to causes of deaths that had occurred by the end of 2006.

Their findings were not all that surprising. Smoking is indeed bad for you-smokers had a death rate that was three times higher than people who had never smoked before. Most of the deaths among smokers were due to diseases that can be caused by smoking. Yet the researchers found that those who quit smoking by the age of 40 added nine years back onto their life expectancy.

For those who do smoke, here are some key things to keep in mind if you're trying to quit.