One in Four Smokers Will Get Lung Disease

TUESDAY, Oct. 17 (HealthDay News) -- A new study finds that at least 1 in every 4 smokers will develop progressive and incurable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a much higher risk than previously believed.

COPD is a respiratory disease that results in blocked air flow to the lungs and grows progressively worse.

For this study, published online in the journal Thorax, researchers at Hvidovre Hospital analyzed data on 8,000 men and women, ages 30 to 60. All were monitored for 25 years as part of the Copenhagen City Heart Study.

At the start of the study, all the participants' lungs were healthy and working normally. However, over the course of the 25 years, the lungs of almost all the male non-smokers continued to function normally, compared to 60 percent of men who continued to smoke.

Among women, 90 percent of non-smokers still had healthy lungs at the end of 25 years, compared to 70 percent of smokers.

Overall, 25 percent of the participants developed moderate or severe COPD over the 25 years. Persistent smokers were six times more likely to develop COPD than non-smokers.

During the 25 years, there were 2,900 deaths in the study group. Of those deaths, 109 were directly attributable to COPD, and nearly all those deaths were in people who were active smokers at the start of the study. Only two non-smokers died of COPD.

The study also found a sharp decline in the risk of COPD among people who stopped smoking soon after the start of the study. Over the 25 years, none of these ex-smokers developed severe COPD.

An observation you would not have made had only my fingers and teeth been stained yellow by a 3 pack a day habit.

Such a narcissist you are. By the way, I neither have yellow-stained teeth and fingers nor do I smoke 3 packs a day.

With your vivid imagination, perhaps you should pursue a career as a writer.

Though I imagine the public could take only so many of your autobiographies.

You are transparent. We see through you.

I'm not entirely sure what, in your fevered mind, you imagine I'm hiding.

Who's "we," by the way?

Certainly you can't be aware of just what sort of deaths I have witnessed during the course of my life.

I've seen a bunch of it though. Slow deaths, quick deaths...In the end....death is death....

I have to say that if I have a death to choose, it would not be one that is caused by foolish choices that result in what might seem like endless suffering. Most COPDers do not go out easy, and I have yet to meet one who wishes that they could have one more smoke before they croak. They are probably out there, but none have come under my radar yet.

I agree with you.....I think. Risk taking is a good thing. I do not think that bungee jumping, or jumping out of a perfectly good working airplane is bright unless it is for some greater cause such as the the preservation of one's own life, or the lives of others. Many of the risks that we take are without merit, yet we all do it from time to time it seems to me.

Dialogue about this stuff is actually good food for thought.

"Have you been witness to any deaths due to respiratory failure by people who've run around plugging all the "health" holes their whole lives and died anyway?"

I think no, but I couldn't talk about it anyway if I had.

I don't understand a lot of things. One of things that I have never understood even a little bit is why people would light a flame to a dead plant, and then inhale the smoke that results from it. That one I never understood, even from when I was about 9 years old and all of my friends and my family were doing it.

You can debate the merits of smoking with that particular 9 year old in some other reality.

I've done a lot of stupid things in my life, but smoking cigarettes is not one of them. Defending the smoking of cigarettes is another dumb thing that I have also never done in my life.

On the other hand. I have never been a smoking Nazi, and if people want to do dumb shit, then I say it is OK as long as it don't hurt me. If smoking in a restaurant for example bothered me, I simply would not patronize that restaurant. I don't need my government to compel restaurants to ban smoking.

Smoking is a dirty, filthy, offensive, selfish habit.

Interesting, skimming through this thread just now for grins, and came across your statement.

It is exactly what my Dad told me when I was quite young (he was a Camel smoker at the time) and I took it to heart, never smoked. My Dad quit several times, only to start again. He developed emphysema, lung cancer that required part of his lungs removed, and ultimately died of the lung cancer spreading to his bone marrow.

I subsequently developed a harsh attitude toward anyone fouling my breathing air with smoke. It is absolutely their right to puff away, just as it is my right to defend my health and quality of life.

Praise God for your freedom from the dreaded stuff. Sorry about your Dad.

It is harder to quit smoking than quitting heroine. So the attitudes hereon are par for the course.

Having had allergies all my life and respiratory complications aplenty without smoking, I'm a bit extra sensitized to "clean" air. Though one wonders where left on earth that is unless it's Antarctica.

I find the attitudes defending the habit sad and unfortunate but predictable. If one is going to deliberately persist in throwing trash into one's lungs, then the ante is hugely high to defend it fiercely.

I think there's a measure of sadness and guilt about being victimized, enslaved to a crass little bunch of tobacco . . . and then anger at feeling guilty yielding fierce rationalization and defensiveness.

I haven't seen studies but I'd love to see a study comparing the percentages of REACTIVE ATTACHMENT DISORDER amongst smokers vs nonsmokers. I suspect strongly that there's a significant difference just judging from the psychodynamics of addiction and the seemingly markedly above average evidence of routine selfishness evident in the various common smoking behaviors.

I personally prefer a minimum of government interference in private lives. But government is there to help us conform our behavior to the good we already know is the right thing to do. It's not going to help much with a rebellious population that far outweighs the police force in numbers and fierceness to rebel in this or that given way or ways.

Part of me really does suspect that the globalist puppet masters have taken up where the greedy tobacco companies left off in aiding and abetting the enslavement toward decreasing the population toward their 500,000,000 worldwide goal. But, if so, it's one of their . . . devastating efforts but not equal to their war efforts . . . or is it. I wonder what a statistical comparison of those deaths would look like.

I mostly pontificate a bit on these threads to offer those torn between some encouragement to make the break and go for greater health and improved social comfort. But I certainly expect the fierce anti-forum-rules folks to personally assault me in response to every post.

I don't care if they assault me, that much. If my words cause anyone to pause a bit longer and eventually decide a bit sooner to stop the deadly habit, it will have been worth the assaults. And certainly so for their kids.

Life is pretty precious. I hate to see any of it going up in smoke and degraded because of smoke whether physiologically disease wise or "merely" irritation-wise in relationships.

Thanks for your understanding posts. They aren't overly common on such threads. The folks on our side tend to stay away because of the shrill hostility on the other side.

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