I Will Quit Smoking – With determination anyone could do it!

Quitting smoking? It’s definitely a step in the right direction towards improving your health. But make sure to watch your weight in the process or your lungs won’t see all the benefits that come from butting out.

“The overall effect of quitting smoking on lung function seems beneficial, but this effect could change over time if mean BMI continues to increase in the population,” writes author Dr. Susan Chinn in the journal The Lancet.

Chinn and her colleagues studied the effect of smoking habits and weight on lung function in more than 6,650 adults aged 20 to 44. When the study began, in the early 1990s, the researchers recorded the subjects’ lung function, weight and height and questioned them on their smoking habits. Several years later, the researchers collected new information on the same criteria, along with data on participants’ smoking habits between surveys, and analyzed the information to see how changes in smoking and weight affected lung function.

All of the participants, on average, gained weight over the course of the study. But people who quit smoking gained the most (an average of 0.79 kg a year for men and 0.78 kg a year for women), while people who quit and restarted gained the least (0.28 kg a year for men and 0.22 kg for women). Men who never smoked gained an average of 0.57 kg a year, while women gained 0.53 kg.

Overall, the participants all saw some degree of decline in lung function as a result of the aging process. But not surprisingly, people who had never smoked showed the least decline, while those who quit smoking showed a lesser degree of decline than those who continued to smoke.

But once the researchers accounted for weight when looking at the rate of decline among former smokers, they found that weight gain cancelled out some of the benefit of quitting. “The relation of decline in lung function to increasing weight or BMI was substantially greater in men than in women,” they noted.

On average, weight gain diminished the benefits of quitting on lung function by 38% in men and 17% in women, the researchers found. But men who gained 1 kg a year showed zero benefit from quitting when it came to forced expiratory volume, a measure of lung function, while women had to gain 2.43 kg a year to lose the entire benefit of quitting.

These results underscore the importance of controlling weight after quitting smoking, the researchers say. “Most behavioural weight-control interventions have been ineffective in the long term, but pharmacological interventions to promote smoking cessation also reduced weight gain,” they note in their conclusion. “However, nicotine replacement therapy might only delay weight gain until it is stopped.”

In a separate editorial, which also appeared in The Lancet, Dr. Graham Colditz of Harvard Medical School notes that in spite of weight gain, the benefits of quitting smoking outweigh the risks.

“The findings of Chinn and colleagues suggest that these health advantages could potentially be increased by weight control at the time of quitting,” he writes, adding that doctors should emphasize exercise and plenty of support for patients who are trying to kick the habit.

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