How To Quit Smoking: Respiratory Health

Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

How to quit smoking

Before going into further detail about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), it is important to understand that quitting smoking is the most effective step you can take not only to prevent COPD but to arrest its progress. If no one smoked, COPD would be very rare indeed. In the United States, smoking rates have plummeted over the past several decades among both adults and teenagers, which means that the incidence of lung disease in this country is also bound to fall in the years to come.

The percentage of men 18 and older who smoke has dropped to 26% from a height of 52% in 1965, and the percentage of adult women who smoke has dropped to 22% from 34%. Among high school students, 28% smoke, down from 35% in 1999. If this trend continues, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the United States could meet its health goal of reducing smoking rates among high school students to 16%.

However, the outlook is discouraging in many other countries, especially in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia, where smoking rates are rising steeply. This increase is one reason that the World Health Organization projects that COPD will go from being the sixth most common cause of death around the world today to being the third most common by 2020.

Last updated:	May 23, 2007