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Think Cutting Back on Smoking Will Help? Think Again.

Last year, you weren’t able to keep your New Year’s resolution to quit smoking, so you’re still puffing away. This year, you still want to make a positive step to better your health, so you’re going to try to cut back on your smoking habit, if you can’t quit outright.

It sounds like a good idea: smoking fewer cigarettes has to improve your health, right?

Not so much. New research reveals that halving the number of cigarettes you smoke every day makes no difference in your risk of dying from a smoking-related disease.

“A reduction in cigarette consumption by more than 50 percent is not associated with a markedly lower risk of [death], specifically of dying from cardiovascular disease or smoking-related cancer,” wrote study author Aage Tveral from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health in Oslo, Norway.

The study, published in Tobacco Control, included over 51,000 men and women between the ages of 20 and 34, who were monitored twice over a period of 20 years.

The participants were grouped according to their smoking history. There were those who never smoked and ex-smokers. But among those who began the study as smokers, there were quitters (stopped smoking over the course of the study), moderate smokers (1-14 cigarettes daily), reducers (started the study smoking 15 or more cigarettes but cut that number by half) and heavy smokers (15 or more cigarettes a day).

Over the course of the study, the researchers found that there was no difference in the number of smoking-related deaths between the heavy smokers and the reducers. For women, in fact, the death rate from cancer rose in the group that reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked.

Only the group of men who cut back the number of cigarettes they smoked during the first 15 years of the study saw any improvement in death rates, although it was slight.

Tveral wrote that as a result of his findings, doctors and other health educators should make sure that patients understand that cutting back is not nearly the same as quitting.

“The only safe way out of the risk caused by smoking” is to quit, he says. And while lowering the number of cigarettes you smoke may be one step on the way to a cigarette-free life, “a reduction in consumption does not seem to bring about harm reduction.”