How many years of smoking will cause someone to get a smoking related disease or cancer?I just want to know is it after 20 years 30 years? less then that? Whats the chance they will die from smoking if they dont stop?
iceman
There is no answer to that question, at least not an accurate one.
What I can tell you is that the vast majority of lung cancer cases are people that have smoked for most of their life. The typical lung cancer patient is someone in their 60s or 70s that has smoked since they were young.
Dr. House
It depends on a lot of factors one of them being the amount cigarettes/day. I have seen patients with lung cancer or bronchial cancer after 20 years of smoking and patients who never smoked. It is like Russian roulette. However theses type of cancers have a very bad prognosis.
Memere RN/BA
No one can give you a sound answer for that. It's not possible. Granted, a lot of diseases have afflicted a smoker, but then you have those who have smoke almost all their lives and never get anything. The person I refer to a lot is an old movie actress, Betty Davis. That woman smoked non filtered cigarettes until she died in her 90's. She never got lung cancer, To me, that's way out of the norm. I don't think she even had emphysema. You can't go by her though, it was just to show you that everyone immune system is different. Some can tolerate it. others can't. My theory is when a child, and I do mean child, like 12 starts smoking, they put themselves at a higher risk because their lungs are not even fully developed yet. My dumb ex-son-in-law started smoking when he was 8, You have to wonder, didn't his parents smell it on them. I know when my daughter tried smoking at 15, I smelled it on her as soon as she walked in the door. Now I was a smoker at the time as well. I smoked for 40+ yrs. I was 20 or 21 when I started. I forgot, Rather forget. So I really think it depends on the age one started, how good of an immune system you have. but no one will make me believe that after smoking for 40+ yrs, that my lungs are clear now after 1 yr. No, I think it will be a lot longer before I have good looking lungs again, if I ever so. So, there you have it. Hope it helps. Please don't ever smoke and if you do, think about quitting. God bless
Josh
That depends on how much they smoke, at one extreme if you're young and smoke no more than a few a day the risk is negligible, at the other if you smoke 3 packs a day you're very likely to get something. Your risk starts to increase at about 10 pack years -- that's a pack a day for 10 years, half a pack for 20, etc. But it's also a matter of chance and genetics, you can say how *likely* someone is to get a smoking-related disease at a certain age but some people will, some won't.
In practice, people start to die of smoking-related diseases in their mid-50's, with the risk increasing as time goes on. It *can* happen earlier, but in all my life, I've never known anyone who died of it younger than that.
If you smoke and want to see what your risk is, do a search for "smoking risk calculator" and plug your numbers in.
Spreedog
There does seem to be a twenty year lead time between smoking incidence and lung cancer rates looking at data throughout the 1900's, but that is very rough data. Only 3% of lung cancer patients in the USA are under age 45. Iceman has a good answer here. I've seen hundreds of people with lung carcinomas, and I figure the average person smoked about half a million cigarettes.
John Wayne probably smoked well over a million cigarettes before his lung carcinoma in 1964.
BUT - there is great variation from person to person.
Perhaps 5 out of 6 people who are chronic smokers "get away with it" - do not develop cancers.
Though they may have heart disease, vascular disease, or emphysema rather than a malignancy.
So smoking is slow form of Russian roulette.
Remember that cigarette smoking is not just a risk for lung cancer - the number one cancer killer - 31% of all cancer deaths in the USA. Cigarettes cause cancers of the mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, stomach, lungs, bladder, and others. These are the most difficult types of cancer to treat successfully. Much better to avoid them by not smoking.
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