Smoking cessation and health
- Presenter:
Mon June 5, 2006 9:30-10:45 Room Alumni Lounge
Rationale: Medical and public health studies have found that smoking may increase the likelihood of diseases occurring and causing premature death. Many developed countries, including Taiwan, have implemented a variety of policies designed to raise the costs of smoking in order to reduce cigarette consumption. Most studies have provided evidence that smoking may harm one’s health. However, not enough studies have shown the benefits to health from a cessation of smoking.
Objectives: In this paper, we empirically study the health effect of smoking cessation on the elderly male (aged sixty and over) in Taiwan.
Methodology: We derive data from the “Survey of Health and Living Status of the Middle Aged and Elderly in Taiwan: A Longitudinal Study Since 1989” which provides information regarding the subjects’ smoking history before 1989 and smoking behavior from 1989 to 1999. We define the health effect by the following two measures. One is survival years, given survived at age 60 and the other is self-assessed health status, which is categorized into five degrees: excellent, very good, good, fair and poor. We adopt Cox proportional hazard model to estimate the effect of early smoking cessation on the hazard rate of one’s life and ordered probit model to analyze the health effect of the length of sustaining smoking cessation.
Results: The empirical results show that those who quit smoking before the age of 54 had a lower hazard ratio and a higher survival probability. In addition, the results show that, among those who quit smoking before 1989, the self-assessed health status was better the longer the smoking had ceased. Besides, the results also show that the younger a person is when he becomes addicted, the more likely he is to die at each age.
Conclusions: Our empirical analysis implies that early smoking cessation is positively associated with longer life and better health status.
