Smoking really does make you look older, a twin study confirms
You know smoking doesn’t do any favors for your face - or your lungs, or your heart, or just about any other part of your body, for that matter! – but a new study of twins hints at the ways the habit makes you look older than you really are.
In what is perhaps the best detail of the study, researchers used the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio (the “Largest Annual Gathering of Twins in the World!”) to round up the 79 identical pairs they include in the report. A panel of three plastic surgery residents compared the faces of the twins, one of which had been smoking for at least five years longer than the other.
They identified a few major areas of accelerated aging in the faces of the smoking twins: The smokers’ upper eyelids drooped while the lower lids sagged, and they had more wrinkles around the mouth. The smokers were also more likely to have jowls, according to the study, which was published today in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
Smoking reduces oxygen to the skin, which also decreases blood circulation, and that can result in weathered, wrinkled, older-looking skin, explains Dr. Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon in Cleveland, Ohio, and the lead author of the study.
100,000 die annualy in Turkey from smoking
Publishing an announcement about the “Feb. 9th Anti-Somking Day,” the President of the Turkish Green Crescent Prof. M. İhsan Karaman made a call for people to quit smoking. Indicating that cigarette addiction is one of the world’s most prominent health threats, Karaman said diseases that smoking causes kill six million people in the world annually, 100,000 of which live in Turkey.
“Smoking effects both individuals and a country’s economy negatively. The events in Anti-Smoking Day aim to increase social awareness about the dangers of smoking.” he said.
Stating that approximately one out of three adults in the world smoke, Karaman added that cigarettes are the main factor for prominent health problems such as lung cancer and coronary disases as well as respiratory disorders, and it leads to diseases that cause the death of six million people worldwide.
“Cigarettes have more than 4,000 chemical substances that are harmful for our health such as cyanide, ammonia, carbon monoxide, naphthalene, cadmium and acetone. These carcinogenic substances enter our blood circulation through smoking. That’s why cigarettes shorten the lifetime by 20-25 years for those who start smoking at an early ages. Moreover, smokers tend to live an unhealthy life during their lifetime.” he concluded.
The logic of research like this and others like it is this: If threats of cancer, heart and lung disease, or the dangers of second- and third-hand smoke aren’t enough to get people to stop smoking, or to never start in the first place, then why not try appealing to people’s vanity? (The same tactic has been used in an attempt to warn young people away from tanning.)
The twin on the right is a smoker; the twin on the left is a nonsmoker.
But if you’re currently a smoker, the point of this research is not to make you feel bad. Because stopping or cutting back on the habit now can make a difference - in all aspects of your health, including the skin damage to your face. Even the twins who smoked just five fewer years than their siblings had younger-looking faces, the study shows.
Plastic and Reconstructive Surge / American Society of Plastic Surg - Both twins are smokers. The twin on the right smoked 14 years longer than his brother.
The twin on the left is a nonsmoker and the twin on the right smoked for 29 years.
“We tell people, as soon as they stop smoking, the repair to not only to their skin but their lungs, their heart vessels—it starts to repair itself,” says Dr. Robin Ashinoff, medical director of of dermatologic surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey.
###
Melissa Dahl - TODAY