About twenty minutes wasted. 17 if you are a man, 22 minutes if you are a woman. This is what emerges, among other things, from a study published on December 29, 2024 by researchers from University College London. Contrary to popular belief, smoking reduces the number of years in good health and not those at the end of our lives when we are old and in poor health.
Each cigarette brings its share of risks: stroke, cancers (lungs, ENT, bladder, pancreas), heart attacks and respiratory diseases, without forgetting that “tobacco promotes diabetes according to studies”.
“I always take an image: that of the hourglass. The grains of sand represent good health and when they have all escaped, you need to take care of yourself,” explains Christian Frantz, head of the pulmonology department at the Robert Schuman hospitals.
According to the study by British researchers, it is broadly accepted that “smoking mainly encroaches on the relatively healthy middle years rather than on the end of life period”. Thus, a 60-year-old smoker would have the health profile of a 70-year-old non-smoker.
Humans have difficulty imagining the long-term consequences. I often say, when you retire, do you prefer to go from beach to beach or from hospital to hospital?
Christian Frantz
Head of the pulmonology department at Robert Schuman hospitals.
“What we must remember is that one in two smokers will die prematurely from an illness directly linked to tobacco. Smokers lose on average 10 years of life expectancy! As soon as you stop smoking, it is beneficial even if you are old. Probably, after five years of abstinence, we almost regain the life expectancy that we would have had without smoking,” underlines Catherine Charpentier, pulmonologist and tobacco specialist at the Luxembourg Hospital Center (CHL).
In Luxembourg, according to 2023 figures from a survey carried out by the Cancer Foundation and the Ministry of Health and Social Security, 27% of Luxembourg residents over the age of 16 smoke, or around 149,000 people. 18% are considered daily smokers.
What deeply worries doctors and the Cancer Foundation is the proportion of young people which has continued to increase since 2019. “There are more and more young people and girls. In Luxembourg, there is also an astonishing phenomenon: hookah is very fashionable and yet, we are far from the cool and eco-friendly image that is wrongly attributed to it, the nicotine concentrations are very high, quickly leading to a strong dependency,” remarks Catherine Charpentier.
22% of residents say they smoke shisha
Figures from the 2023 survey conducted by the Cancer Foundation and the Ministry of Health and Social Security
The reduction would have no effect in the face of a total shutdown
If you include quitting smoking in your 2025 resolutions, you could save a lot of time. According to estimates proposed by the British study, a smoker, with ten cigarettes on the clock per day, who stops smoking on January 1, 2025 gains “an entire day of life” by January 8. If she continues, she can gain up to a week of life by February 20, a month after August 5 and would have gained 50 days of life by the end of the year just by stopping smoking.
Does reducing your tobacco consumption really help? The answer would lean towards no. “There is no point in reducing your cigarette consumption. If we reduce our cigarette consumption, we instinctively adapt our way of smoking to pull harder on our cigarette in order to inhale the same dose of nicotine, then the tobacco particles penetrate deeper into the bronchial tree,” underlines Catherine Charpentier. .
If it is social and very often associated with habits (like the famous coffee and cigarette or that after a meal), the dependence is also physical and the withdrawal syndromes can generate different reactions: “the person can be cranky, have sweet impulses,…”
“There is a real physical dependence on nicotine. Some people use nicotine to concentrate. A study published the following experiment: smokers very dependent on nicotine who take a long-haul flight of 8 or 10 hours are informed that they could not smoke during the flight but that they could once they arrived at the airport. During the flight, everything goes well; on the other hand, arriving at the airport with an unexpected wait quickly becomes unbearable without tobacco,” explains Catherine Charpentier.
Pulmonologists divided on the issue of electronic cigarettes
“We have to break this super nice image of electronic cigarettes, with flavors designed to attract young people: they represent a gateway to smoking” explains Catherine Charpentier. More and more smokers are abandoning traditional cigarettes for electronic cigarettes in the hope of quitting smoking. Is this really the right thing to do? Even specialists in the sector, pulmonologists, are struggling on the issue.
“Two camps are opposed: the one who says that we do not know the effects of electronic cigarettes in the long term, unlike cigarettes where we have data over 80.90 years. The other camp, to which I personally adhere, which says that the classic cigarette causes enormous damage and that we have the impression that the side effects of the electronic cigarette are less so among active smokers, we offer it,” explains Christian Frantz, head of pulmonology at Robert Schuman hospitals.
In any case, stopping everything seems to be the safest solution to no longer expose yourself to tobacco-related illnesses. “There is a feeling of gaining a space of freedom, saving money, regaining the sense of smell and taste, the skin is also smoother,” lists Catherine Charpentier. To get out of addiction, several solutions exist: contact a professional: a tobacco specialist. Substitution items can be taken to compensate for the first months such as nicotine lozenges, patches, etc.
Raising the price, an essential emergency in Luxembourg?
The price of a pack of cigarettes in Luxembourg costs on average €6 for a pack of 20. This is much less than in France (€12.5), Belgium (€9.5), Germany (€8.5 €), in the Netherlands (9€) or in Ireland (13€). So it’s difficult to stop in “cigarette paradise”, where the price remains largely advantageous?
“We have a tobacco-free generation strategy. Youth is a very important pillar. If they don’t start smoking, there isn’t this problem of addiction and quitting. It’s not just the role of government, but the role of society,” points out Lex Schaul, head of public health at the Cancer Foundation in Luxembourg.
“A bill n°8833 also aims to take action in the fight against tobacco. Nicotine sachets must be regulated and access to minors prohibited. These sachets have high nicotine dosages of around 20mg, the equivalent of around ten cigarettes. Disposable electronic cigarettes, and the advertising linked to them, are also a problem for the introduction of young people to tobacco,” explains Lex Schaul.
In Luxembourg, the number of deaths attributed to tobacco is around 17%. According to one estimate, the number of tobacco-related deaths is 763 per year. The Cancer Foundation speaks of around 1,000 deaths.
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