Smoking takes 10 years off your life

Smokers die 10 years earlier than the rest of the population, a major report has found.

The finding is contained in a 50-year study looking at diseases caused by tobacco and death rates of smokers.

Published tomorrow, the research shows that those who give up cigarettes by the age of 30 reduce their risk of developing cancer to that of a non-smoker.

It also reveals that smokers who manage to stop by the age of 50 halve their chances of lung cancer.

The news will give hope to the thousands of people addicted to nicotine who are struggling to give up smoking. The research is the life's work of Professor Sir Richard Doll, 91, at Oxford University, who has tracked the lives and deaths of 34,439 people.

His work first revealed the link between smoking and lung cancer in 1951.

Tomorrow's report in the British Medical Journal shows that up to two-thirds of those who smoke from when they are young are prematurely killed by the habit. Of those, at least one in four will die in middle age. Of 14,529 described as hardened smokers at the start of the study only 134 were alive in

2001. Professor Doll gave up smoking at the age of 37 when his findings drove home to him the health risks.

Professor Doll says that smoking affects the health of all smokers sooner or later.

His research found that it is a matter of chance if smokers succumb early or late in life because it depends on a series of errors in cell replication that mean cancer can develop. There is no such thing as having the right genes to protect against cancer.