We are bombarded by information every day about things in modern life that are “bad” for us. Often a year later, we hear that what was “bad” is now “good,” or at least not as “bad” as we thought. Cholesterol, artificial sweeteners, sunlight, and birth control pills to name a few. We also are told about new ways we can change our lives to live longer, avoid cancer, and stay healthy. But these too may change. Take beta-carotene to avoid lung cancer! No, wait a minute. It turns out taking beta-carotene actually worsens lung cancer. Take Vioxx for arthritis. Oops. Turns out it causes heart attacks.

What we are almost never told by anybody is what we are really likely to die from in our current stage of life. It turns out that things may be a bit simpler than we are led to believe. There is one thing that is even more “bad” than we thought, and one “good” thing we can do that is even better than we thought!

A new study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute creates a series of “Risk Charts” that tell you what you are likely to die from over the next 10 years, based on your age and your sex. Oh, and whether you are a smoker, non-smoker or former smoker (J Natl Cancer Inst 2008;100:845-853).

Some interesting things emerge when you look at life (and death) this way.  First, clearly women are mis-labeled as the “weaker sex.” Men are more likely to die at every age than women. Second, smoking is like aging yourself 5 to 10 years. Even at the age of 35, a man is almost three times more likely to die in the next decade if he is a smoker.

Staring at these charts also made me realize that it is almost silly to agonize over whether to get a prostate cancer test if I am a smoker, because out of 1,000 55 year old smoking men, only one will die of prostate cancer in the next 10 years, but 34 will die of lung cancer. Similarly out of 1,000 60 year old smoking women, over the next 10 years 6 will die from breast cancer, but 41 will die from lung cancer. And just to be clear, in a similar group of non-smoking 60 year old women, only 3 will die from lung cancer.

The other good news is that all the “badness” associated with being a smoker is markedly decreased in those who quit.  A study done by one of the greatest epidemiologists of the 20th Century, Sir Richard Doll, studied 35,000 British physicians who started out as smokers in the 1950s. They were followed for 50 years. Those who quit in their 30s lived 10 years longer than those who kept smoking! (British Medical Journal, 328(7455):1519–1527)

This is just a taste of the interesting information available, all of which underscores that if there is one thing in life we can be sure of, it is that quitting smoking is by far the best thing most of us can do if we want to “live long and prosper.”