If you have been diagnosed with arthritis, you can cut your risk of dying 50% by cutting out one bad habit. This is according to a new study published in Arthritis Care and Research.
We all know this habit is bad, but it’s particularly bad for arthritics. In fact, you’re 37% more likely to die than non-arthritics with the same bad habit.
The research team wanted to answer two questions:
1. Are smoking arthritis patients more likely to die than smoking non-arthritics?
2. Does giving up smoking soon after an arthritis diagnosis cut the risk of death?
They used the long-term Nurse’s Health Study to identify 938 arthritis patients and 8,951 age-matched non-arthritics to compare them against.
They also gave their participants a questionnaire to examine their smoking and other potentially relevant behaviors.
They found that 40% of newly diagnosed arthritics quit smoking and, after comparing them with the 36% of the non-arthritics who quit at approximately the same time, they found that both groups experienced the same benefits with the same subsequent mortality rate.
Compared with those who continued smoking, the quitters reduced their chance of death by between 42% and 53%.
In other words, arthritis patients who had given up smoking were no more likely than non-arthritic former smokers to die in subsequent years, but 42-53% less likely than continued smokers to die.
But the real interesting finding was that smoking arthritis patients were 37% more likely to die than smoking non-arthritics were. Therefore, smoking is worse for rheumatoid arthritis patients than for their healthy peers.