Online CPR Certification Blog

You may want to tell your teenage kids that smoking does more than just make them look cool; it could be their ticket to an early grave. Apparently, teenagers that smoke increase their chances of dying from heart disease later in life, and this doesn’t change even if they stop smoking before they become middle-aged. Those who start smoking while still in adolescence and stick to this habit all through their life are worse off. They are two times more likely to die before their time as compared to those who don’t smoke. All this is according to findings, which have been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

It’s never too late to quit

According to David Batty who was involved in the new study, the risk increases cumulatively over the period of smoking. People who smoke throughout their lives are at a greater risk than those who smoke for a certain period and then quit. This just goes to show that the sooner you quit the better off you will be health wise. There is no doubting the positivity in this message.

Past and current studies

Studies have been carried out in the past to determine the impact of smoking early in life, and it was consequently, linked to both heart disease and cancer in the future. Unfortunately, the data that was collected in these past studies wasn’t always reliable as it relied on the ability of people in their middle ages to remember how much they smoked when they were much younger. The new study was different and made use of data that had been collected from male Harvard students from 1916 to 1950 during physicals. Those who took the study were sent follow-up surveys from the 60’s to the 80’s

28000 men were used in the new study and of this number around 10000 said they smoked as undergraduates. Shockingly, almost half this number died in an average of 53 years after the initial survey in the school. From the study, it was also seen that those who reported smoking during the physicals in college and were still smoking according to the follow-ups were two times more likely to die than those who did not smoke at all. For those who smoked early in life and later quit the risk was still present but much less than those who smoked throughout at 29%. The risk of cancers that were related to smoking and heart disease was the highest according to the study.

On the Positive side

The study showed that the risk of death dropped quite sharply for people who had quit smoking by the time of the follow-up and this is good news. While the risk isn’t as low as for those who’ve never smoked at all, it is still much less than the other group. With only 3 – percent of smokers quitting each year, this is likely to serve as further encouragement to quit. This should also serve as adequate warning for kids to keep of cigarettes.