People who quit smoking before the age of 35 can eventually live as long and healthy lives as people who never smoked, a new study shows.

“If you quit by age 35, you avoid nearly all of the harm smoking has on lifespan and quality of life,” study author Dr. Donald H. Taylor, Jr., told Reuters Health.

However, it takes time to regain that lost health, the report notes; only people who had quit at least 15 years before the study began lived as many years in good health as never-smokers.

Taylor also cautioned that people should not believe that it’s okay to smoke until you are 35. “The problem is that once you start (smoking), it is hard to quit,” he said.

In the report, Taylor and his co-author Dr. Truls Ostbye, both at Duke University in North Carolina, said that many people focus on how smoking can kill, but less attention is paid to how smoking can affect your quality of life, and cause you to live fewer years in good health.

To investigate, Taylor and Ostbye reviewed interviews collected from middle-aged and older people, in which they were asked about their health and smoking status. The more than 20,000 participants were then re-contacted over several years, to see if their health had changed.

Research has shown that the way people describe their health predicts their future health, so Taylor and Ostbye used participants’ estimations of their health to predict how many more years they would live, and live in good health.

The investigators found that people who were smokers tended to lose more years of healthy life than non-smokers. However, people who had quit smoking at least 15 years before the first interview - between the ages of 35 and 45 -tended to live as many years in good health as people who had never smoked.

Smokers also appeared to live fewer years than non-smokers, regardless of their health status, the authors report in the journal Health Services Research.

Taylor explained that, in order to regain the health they had as non-smokers, people need to butt out for good before they develop health problems. “You can avoid most of the harm by quitting before having a negative health event,” Taylor said. “You can’t wait until you have a heart attack to quit and reap these benefits.”

Taylor added that smokers may be more likely to quit, and people may be less likely to never start smoking, if they hear more messages about how the habit can hurt health.

“The message that smoking kills people is so common that it may not have much impact. Perhaps we need to begin to focus on the debilitating effects of smoking on quality of life,” Taylor said.

SOURCE: Health Services Research, June 2004.