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Quit Facts

• Every cigarette shortens your life by 14 minutes.
• 75% of women who smoke want to quit smoking completely but less than 50% have actually tried to quit smoking
• In 1999, the level of cotinine– a metabolite of nicotine that shows tobacco smoke exposure from the environment– in the blood of non-smokers was more than 75% lower than in 1991.
• In 1999, 21% of women smoked and 12.3% of pregnant women smoked during pregnancy.
• More than 400,000 people die from tobacco-related causes.
• 1 in 5 deaths is tobacco related.
• Men who smoke increase their risk of death from lung cancer by 22%.
• The resting heart rate of young adult smokers is 2-3 beats per minute faster than non-smokers.
• If you buy one pack of cigarettes per day from the kiosk in your Manhattan neighborhood, you will spend $2,800 this year on cigarettes.
• Male smokers tend to have a sperm count that is 15% lower than non-smokers. (But some argue that quality of sperm is more important than quantity.
• Smoking harms the motility of sperm and also affects their shape.
• 2-3 months after quitting smoking, the functioning of the lungs improves by 5%.
• It takes 5-10 seconds for nicotine to reach the brain once smoke is inhaled, twice as fast as injected heroin.
• Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor – a single cigarette can reduce blood supply to the skin for more than an hour. This decreases the amount of oxygen and nutrients in the skin and causes the skin to gray.
• For males in their 30’s and 40’s, smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by about 50%.
• Smokers tend to develop coronary thrombosis – blood clotting – 10 years earlier than non-smokers.
• Infants who are breadfed by their smoking mothers have as much nicotine, the addictive stuff, and nicotine metabolites as their smoking mothers, all passed from breast milk.
• About 40,000 different chemical compounds are found in tobacco smoke and 43 of these are carcinogens – cancer causing.
• Several studies have shown that nicotine has neuroprotective effects; specifically, smoking cigarettes has been shown to be associated with a lower rate of developing schizophrenia.
• A New York poll, taken in October of 2003, found that 62% of New York City voters approve of the smoking ban.
• Lung cancer is now the number one cause of cancer deaths among women, causing more deaths than breast and ovarian cancer combined.
• March 31 is “Kick Butts Day.”   Go to http://kickbuttsday.org for more information.
• Female smokers who take “the pill” are 10 times more likely to have a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular disease than those that do not smoke.

 Smoking and your appearance:

• Smokers have about 10 times more wrinkles than non-smokers.
• Smokers are twice as likely to contract skin cancer than non-smokers because levels of Vitamin A, a protector of the skin against strong chemicals, are lower in smokers.
• If you’re trying to quit, nicotine replacement therapy, the patch”, doubles the chance of success over quitting cold turkey.

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