Quitting smoking is the best way to reduce your risk of the many diseases caused by smoking. Giving up smoking can be difficult, but it is possible, and there is plenty of help available to support you.
The sooner you quit, the more you reduce your risk
If you quit smoking while you’re still in your 20s and 30s, then you avoid almost all the extra risk of dying early. Your risk of dying in middle age will be about the same as that of someone who has never smoked.
However, quitting at almost any age:
- improves your wellbeing
- reduces your risk of early death
- increases your lifespan.
Nicotine is highly addictive. This makes it difficult to quit, but help is available.
For more information, read about nicotine addiction and help with quitting.
Quitting reduces your risk of heart and blood vessel disease
Your risk of getting heart disease reduces rapidly after you quit. It then keeps reducing each year you continue not to smoke.
By about 15 years after stopping smoking, your risk of heart disease becomes the same as if you had never smoked. Your risk of having a stroke or dying from a stroke also starts going down dramatically after you quit. It takes between 5 and 15 years after quitting smoking for your risk of a stroke to be the same as that of a non-smoker.
Quitting also greatly reduces your risk of having an abdominal aortic aneurysm. This is damage to the major blood vessel leading from the heart. It often leads to sudden death. The longer you continue to not smoke, the more your risk reduces, compared to those who keep smoking.
Quitting reduces your risk of cancer
Your risk of lung cancer decreases steadily each year after you quit smoking. After 10 to 15 years, it’s about half of that of someone who still smokes, and it keeps going down after that. This is the same for getting any cancer caused by smoking.
Quitting also lowers your risk of:
- head and neck cancers
- pancreatic, bladder, stomach, colorectal, cervix and kidney cancers
- acute myeloid leukaemia.
For some of these cancers, after a long enough time, your risks are no higher than those of people who have never smoked.
Damage starts to reverse as soon as you quit
The sooner you quit, the sooner you start to see the benefits.
Once you quit, the level of inflammation in your body starts to reduce. Your blood becomes less sticky, and less likely to form clots. The amount of ‘good’ fats compared to ‘bad’ fats in your blood increases.
Quitting reduces the chances that your arteries will harden. If they have already started hardening, that process will start to slow down.
Compared to people who keep smoking, people who quit have fewer and less severe pre-cancerous changes to the lining of their throat and lungs.
Quitting prevents further damage
Even if you already have heart disease, quitting smoking reduces your risk of dying early, such as from a heart attack. If you have already had a heart attack, quitting reduces your risk of having another one.
Quitting also reduces your risk of having a disability after a stroke, and it reduces your risk of dying from a stroke. Most of the lung damage caused by smoking is permanent, but quitting slows down any further damage.
As people age, their lungs don’t work as well, and this drop in lung function continues with time. Lung function usually starts to reduce more quickly in people who smoke. However, within 5 years of quitting, it goes back to the far slower rate of decline that naturally occurs as you get older.
Regardless of your age, you’re still better off quitting than you are continuing to smoke
Quitting at about 60 years of age can still reduce your risk of dying early by about 40%.
Even among people who already have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from smoking, quitting decreases the risk of having to go to hospital for treatment.
Those who have quit need fewer visits to the doctor and use less medication to treat their airway inflammation.
The longer it is since you’ve quit, the more your risk is reduced, compared to people who keep smoking.
Support available for quitting
Quitting smoking is the best way to reduce your risk of the many diseases caused by smoking. No matter your age, quitting will improve your health.
Quitting can be difficult. Most people need more than one go at quitting before they succeed. However, there is plenty of help available.
Many research studies have looked at the effects of quit smoking therapies and medications. There is no one strategy that will work for everyone. Research has shown that both medications and counselling increase the chances of successfully quitting.
Nicotine medications can help you quit. Using nicotine patches or nicotine gum, lozenge, mouth spray or inhalators increases your chance of quitting, particularly if you combine slow and fast-acting forms. There are other medications available from your doctor that can reduce the stress of quitting.
Combining medications with counselling support gives you the best possible chance of quitting. Even though quitting is difficult, more than 5 million Australians who used to smoke have now successfully quit.
You can get help by:
- accessing counselling support through Quitline – 13 78 48
- reading more on quit.org.au
- downloading the My QuitBuddy app.
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