Quit Smoking

Doing the Sums on Smoking
Time to crunch the numbers!
Let’s say you’re a packet-a-day smoker and spend $21 on cigarettes each day.

$147 per week	A nice meal out or New clothes
$630 per month	A weekend away or A brand new TV
$7665 per year	Home renovations or A luxury cruise
$38,325 in 5 years	An all-expenses-paid, dream family holiday or A car or boat
$76,650 in 10 years	Paying off a big chunk of your mortgage or Part of a deposit on a new unit

Data from the National Drug Strategy Household Survey show that in Australia in 2016, daily smokers were more than twice as likely to have high/very high levels of psychological distress compared with people who had never smoked (22% compared with 10%, respectively) and were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed or treated for a mental health condition (29% compared with 12%).

Smoking can have a major impact on a person’s ability to have children by affecting women’s ovaries and men’s sperm counts. Additionally, if you’re a woman and you’re pregnant, there are even more reasons to give up. Smoking when pregnant can cause low birth weight, premature birth, abnormal bleeding, and even miscarriage.

Smoking during pregnancy is also thought to increase the risk of a baby being a victim of cot death and of going on to develop a range of illnesses later in life.

If smoking generally adds a hurdle to finding a new partner, impotence sure doesn’t help. Yet smoking increases the chances of impotence dramatically for men by affecting blood vessels, including those that must dilate in order for an erection to occur.

Smoking kills half of all smokers who continue to smoke
So what happens when you quit

• In five days most nicotine is out of your body
• In one week your sense of taste and smell improves
• In one month your skin appearance is likely to improve
• In two months your lungs will no longer be producing extra phlegm caused by smoking
• In three months your lung function begins to improve
• In twelve months your risk of heart disease has halved
• In five years your risk of a stroke has dramatically decreased
• In ten years of stopping, your risk of lung cancer is less than half that of a continuing smoker and continues to decline (provided the disease is not already present).

Activities of daily living’ (ADL) are those skills needed in typical daily self-care, while ‘Instrumental activities of daily living’ (IADL) refer to skills beyond basic self-care that evaluate how individuals function within their homes, workplaces and social environments. IADL may include typical domestic tasks such as driving, cleaning, cooking and shopping, as well as other less physically demanding tasks such as operating electronic appliances and handling budgets.

A longitudinal study conducted in Japan examined the relationship between smoking in middle age and long-term risk of impaired activities of daily living (ADL) in more than 2000 men and women. The researchers reported more than double the risk of impaired ADL among current smokers compared with non-smokers (OR 2.11; 95% CI, 1.09–4.06). Risk of impaired ADL was higher as the number of cigarettes increased. The study concluded that smoking in middle age increases future risks of impaired ADL and that smoking cessation may be important to prevent future impairment of ADL