Benefits Found at Any Age : Giving Up Smoking: It’s Never Too Late
BOSTON — You’re never too old to quit smoking, say researchers who found that even people in their 70s significantly reduce their risk of heart attack and death when they kick the habit.
Their study disputes the notion that old people have already suffered too much damage from smoking to benefit from quitting.
They found that over six years, the death rate of older folks who continued to smoke was 70% higher than that of people who had recently quit.
The study was based on people who already had clogged heart arteries, a condition that affects an estimated 3.9 million Americans over age 54. Other research is under way to see if older people with healthy hearts also live longer if they stop smoking.
“The message is that it’s never too late to quit,” said Bonnie Hermanson. “Older people with heart disease have just as much benefit from quitting as younger people do.”
The study, conducted by Hermanson and colleagues from the University of Washington and the Mayo Clinic, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was based on men and women over age 54 who took part in the Coronary Artery Surgery Study, or CASS, a major review of coronary bypass surgery.
Cigarette smoking is considered to be the chief avoidable cause of death in the United States. According to the national Centers for Disease Control, smoking was responsible for 320,515 deaths in 1984. About one-third of them were smoking-related fatal heart attacks, strokes and cardiac arrest.
“There is some feeling that it’s too late for older people to quit, because they have had too much damage over the years,” said Hermanson. However, “there is very little data dealing with elderly people. Most smoking studies are done on those who are middle aged or younger.”
Carefully Documented
Dr. John H. Holbrook of the University of Utah said the new study shows the advantage of quitting in people whose heart disease has been carefully documented.
“No matter how old you are, no matter how long you’ve smoked, there’s a benefit to quitting,” he said. “And as far as heart attack is concerned, the benefits begin to accrue within a few months.”
The risk of lung cancer, another major hazard of smoking, also drops when people stop smoking, although the reduction is not as fast as the fall in heart attacks.
The latest study was based on a comparison of 807 people who had quit smoking within the previous year and 1,086 people who continued to smoke. During six years of follow-up, 210 of the quitters and 391 of the continuing smokers died.
Comparisons Given
The differences cannot be blamed on more severe heart disease among those who continued to smoke. In fact, the quitters were actually sicker than the smokers, the researchers said.
Dr. Bernard J. Gersh, a co-author of the study at the Mayo Clinic, said the lower death rate among the quitters resulted largely from fewer heart attacks.
Among the study’s conclusions:
- After the researchers adjusted their findings for severity of heart disease, those who continued to smoke had a 70% higher risk of death.
- Thirty-eight percent of the smokers died during the six-year period, compared with 28% of the quitters.
- Among those over age 70, 50% of the quitters died during the follow-up, compared with 68% of the smokers.
- The greatest difference in survival was among those with moderate degrees of heart disease.
- The benefits of quitting were similar for men and for women.
- The advantages of giving up smoking that were seen in older people were virtually the same as those in middle-age people.
“On the basis of these results,” the researchers wrote, “we believe that it is worthwhile for physicians to encourage their elderly patients with coronary artery disease to quit smoking as strongly as they do their younger patients.”
