03/02/2020
The Conversation
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Editor's note
The best way to reduce your risk of lung cancer? Don’t smoke. And if you do, quit smoking. But until now, researchers have been perplexed about why quitting smoking reduces your risk of developing lung cancer so significantly. In a bid to understand what happens to normal cells when they’re exposed to to***co smoke, a team of researchers instead uncovered the surprising answer to this question. They found that in people who quit smoking, the body actually replenishes the airways with normal, non-cancerous cells that help protect the lungs – which in turn reduces the risk of getting lung cancer.
Of course, those who had never smoked were better off. But this latest study found that even in a person who had smoked every day for more than 40 years, ex-smokers had four times the amount of these protective cells than current smokers did. So even if your new year’s resolution has failed, it’s still not too late to quit.
The study found that ex-smokers had four times the amount of "normal" protective cells than ex-smokers.