For Smokers, Never Too Late to Quit; Diesel and Cancer

June 20, 2012

Tobacco kills about six million people each year throughout the world

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

There is new medical evidence for the expression "better late than never." Researchers have found that smokers reduce their risk of dying from tobacco even if they stop smoking after the age of sixty.

Smoking is a known risk for many diseases, including many forms of cancer as well as heart disease. But most studies on the health effects of smoking involve middle-aged people.

The latest analysis by German researchers examined the findings of seventeen studies carried out in the United States, China, Australia, Japan, England, Spain and France.

Smokers sixty and older had an eighty-three percent increased risk of dying from all causes compared to people who had never smoked. Smokers also had a thirty-four percent higher risk of death compared to former smokers.

T.H. Lam is professor in the school of public health at the University of Hong Kong. He says people who continue to smoke as seniors have at least a fifty percent chance of dying from their smoking habit.

T.H. LAM: "And if they stop smoking, then they can reduce about one-quarter of their excess risk. So this is good news that older people should not continue to smoke."

What about smokers who start at a young age and stop when they are in their thirties? Dr. Lam says they can reduce their risk of dying from a smoking-related illness to almost the same level as someone who never smoked. Even people who never smoke can still die from breathing other people's secondhand smoke.