Each Cigarette Costs You 20 Minutes of Life, New Study Warns

Here’s some extra motivation for anyone looking to quit smoking as part of their New Year’s resolutions. Research published this week finds that each cigarette you smoke will shorten your life by nearly a half hour.

Scientists at the University College London conducted the study, which is an update to a previous estimate of how life-sapping cigarette smoking can be. Based on more recent data, they calculated that a single cigarette will shave off about twenty minutes from the average person’s life. The findings emphasize the importance of quitting smoking as early as possible, the researchers say.

Plenty of studies and tragic anecdotes have confirmed the deadliness of cigarette smoking. Smoking can damage nearly every organ and raise the risk of life-threatening health problems like emphysema, heart disease, and cancers of the lungs and mouth, to name a few. But the UCL researchers wanted to better quantify the harm of smoking to our lifespans using the most current data available.

A 2000 study of British smokers estimated that each cigarette costs a person about 11 minutes of life on average. That estimate relied on assumptions derived from data on men alone, however, such as studies that tracked the average age of male smokers at death compared to non-smokers. This time around, the UCL researchers were able to analyze data from women smokers in the U.K., too. They also analyzed more recent data on British men’s mortality along with data on how much daily cigarettes people are smoking today on average.

Overall, after adjusting for other factors like a person’s wealth, the researchers estimated that people who never stopped smoking lost about 10 to 11 years from their life expectancy relative to a non-smoker—higher than the previous estimate of 6.5 lost years of life. They also estimated that each cigarette costs 20 minutes of life on average—17 minutes for men and 22 minutes for women.

Most of these stolen minutes, the researchers note, are taken from a person’s middle and healthier years, rather than at the end of their life. In other words, smokers likely experience the usual health issues of aging for the same duration but reach that stage sooner. As an example, the researchers highlighted that a 60-year-old lifelong smoker is expected to have the typical health of a 70-year-old nonsmoker.

“This is time that would likely be spent in relatively good health,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published Sunday in the journal Addiction.

The findings are still reliant on some assumptions about the harms of cigarette smoking—harms that aren’t distributed evenly among everyone. Not every smoker will develop lung cancer, for instance. Cigarettes these days also contain less tar than they did decades ago, so smokers today might be getting exposed to less toxins than before. That said, “low tar” cigarettes don’t appear to substantially lower people’s risk of cancer or other problems (one reason why might be that smokers will often take bigger puffs to get more nicotine).

Thankfully, people in general are smoking less than ever, which has helped contribute to lower cancer cases and deaths. But smoking and secondhand smoking is still estimated to help cause nearly a half million deaths in the U.S. alone every year. Though the damage from smoking may be permanently life-shortening, it’s still worthwhile to quit no matter how old you are, the researchers say. But the earlier you quit, the better off you’ll be.

“Stopping smoking at every age is beneficial but the sooner smokers get off this escalator of death the longer and healthier they can expect their lives to be,” they wrote.