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Smoking Control

Not smoking is good for your health. If you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke, make stopping your first priority.

Tobacco smoking is responsible for 80% of lung cancers. The danger for smokers is directly related to the amount of cigarettes smoked. The risk is tiny if you smoke only a few cigarettes a day. The likelihood of cancer increases markedly as the smoker moves up to a pack a day and is extraordinarily high for those who smoke two to four packs a day.

There are two components to smoking-related lung cancer risk: the number of cigarettes you smoke each day and how many years you have smoked. Of the two, duration is more important. If you smoke a given number of cigarettes for 10 years, the risk is much greater than smoking the same amount for five years. Although duration of smoking is more critical than dose, it is important to realize that doubling the number of cigarettes used per day from, say, 10 to 20, or 20 to 40, will double the risk of lung cancer.

Stopping smoking will reduce lung cancer occurrence and, for the ex-smoker, the more years of non-smoking, the greater the reduction on the risk of lung cancer, although the risk will not be as low as that of someone who never smoked at all for at least twenty years.

Cigarette smoking is also the major risk factor for mouth and larynx cancer, and is a major risk factor for heart disease.

Another benefit for stopping smoking is that within five years of stopping smoking, the heart attack risk becomes the same as a person that never smoked.

If you have other risk factors for coronary heart disease and heart attacks, such as high cholesterol or high blood pressure, you should not be smoking at all.

The conclusion is very clear. Not smoking is good for your health. If you do not smoke now, do not become a smoker; if you do smoke, stopping is a very good idea. If you cannot stop, then less than ten cigarettes of the low-tar, filtered variety should be your goal–it reduces, but does not eliminate, the health risks.