Should Seniors Quit Smoking?

Should Seniors Quit Smoking?

It is far easier to quit smoking if you are younger and have not been smoking for very long. A teenager who has smoked only a few months, or a couple of years, will certainly find it easier to kick the habit than someone in their thirties who has smoked for ten years. But what about those smokers who have been smoking since they were in their teens and are now are approaching their sixties.

That means they have been smoking for nearly forty years. Someone who has smoked this long is more likely to be a heavier smoker, at least twenty cigarettes daily, and that is a strong addition. As well, one of the reasons it is harder to get an older smoker to break their habit is that they believe that they have been smoking long enough that if something bad was going to happen it already would have.

They look and say they are still alive so their smoking is not going to hurt them, and if it did it will not make much difference anymore. This, of course, makes no sense. Even though some people will smoke their whole lives with no side effects, many more will suffer from coughs, wheezing, shortness of breath and other respiratory ailments traced directly back to their smoking habit. Perhaps they need to look at the cigarette facts.

As recently as a couple of years ago there were over eighteen million smokers over the age of forty five, nine percent of these were over the age of sixty five. Of these eighteen million smokers two and a half percent die each year of smoking related illnesses. That shows how terrible cigarette smoking truly is. Those who smoke cigarettes and are seniors continue to increase their risks. They are twice as likely to succumb to a stroke if they are men and one and a half times more likely if they are women.

They are sixty percent more likely to have a heart attack and have twice as much chance of succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. They are also more likely to wind up with cataracts some of which will be severe enough to blind them. Smokers are likely to live ten to fourteen years less than they otherwise would if they did not smoke.

Those ten to fourteen years could be their retirement years or the period of time when their grandchildren are being born. They must ask themselves if smoking cigarettes is truly worth missing their grandchildren over. Too often someone who is older assumes that the damage has already been done and so what is the point of quitting, but this is not true.

Even a senior adds back a few years once they stop smoking. They diminish the damage done to their lungs and will actually begin to breathe noticeably better after they quit. Interestingly it seems that the improvements are more noticeable in women than in men. This all proves that there is no age at which it is unwise to quit smoking.