Data from several studies shows that smoking permanently damages a person’s DNA.
It may come as no surprise that smoking cigarettes and other products alters a person’s genetic code, but it may shock some to know that the negative effects coming from smoking may be permanent.
The research examined information from 16 studies conducted over several decades, affecting a total of about 16,000 people. While some people’s DNA recovered greatly after five years, some effects of smoking remained for longer than that.
Some smokers had residual symptoms of the activity even 30 years after stopping. This may be scary to some, but the studies also suggest that the faster you can kick the habit, the better off you are.
The process examined by this research is called DNA methylation, which means that genetic changes don’t change the way genes naturally come, but they do change the way they’re expressed.
Smoking can lead to a number of health hazards, including cancer — lung, bone and others — as well as heart disease and stroke. About 6 million people die every year as a result of illnesses brought on by smoking.
DNA methylation may cause diseases in the long term because of how they can have a permanent effect on your genetic code.
“We could use this type of data to estimate people’s previous smoking,” one researcher said. “No one says they smoke when they don’t, but they say they don’t smoke when they do, so we could use these signals to find that out.”
