London – It is more probable that smokers will quit the hazardous habit if they are informed about the age of their lungs, a study identified on Friday.

In the lung age concept, the age of the lungs is measured by comparing the lungs of the smoker to a healthy person’s age whose lungs function as same as that of the smoker’s. This has helped patients to understand about the ill effects of smoking effectively, researchers had previously found.

But the information is also useful in persuading smokers to quit the habit, said Gary Parkes, who led the study that was published in the British Medical Journal. Gary Parkes is a family physician in Hertfordshire outside London.

“Revealing to the smokers of their lung age can considerably increase the probability of quitting the habit,” Gary Parkes and his team wrote.

Tobacco is extremely addictive and is the major cause for the diseases like heart disease and cancer. According to the World Health Organization about 4 million people die each year due to smoking.

The study was conducted in 5 general medical practices in the London outskirts and involved about 561 long term smokers who were above 35 years of age. The study was started with a small test to find out the volume and rate in which the participants exhaled air from the lungs.

One set of participants were given no detailed information regarding their results where as others were informed about their lung age, and were shown a diagram of how smoking makes the lungs larger. They were also said that quitting would decrease the rate of damage.

All the participants were strongly advised to quit and were also offered aid to do so. After a year, saliva tests found out that 13 % of the smokers, who were told about their lung age, had given up the habit compared to 6 % in the other group.

“Persons who had good, comprehensible information looked more inclined to quit,” Parkes said. “One reason may be smokers had feared the worst and understood it was still sensible to give up”, he added. Parkes also said that the study answers the benefits of early diagnosing because 16 % of the participants had undiagnosed emphysema.

Providing people this sort of information may be an easy and cheap way to make people to quit smoking and decrease health problems related to smoking that are exerting pressure on health systems to treat.

“The cost, if you are interested, is definitely inside the economic framework of a good deal,” Parkes added.

Related Links:

• Effect on smoking quit rate of telling patients their lung age: the Step2quit randomised controlled trial

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