Follow Us on Google
People who smoke, and even those who have given up, report living in more pain than those who have never picked up the habit, according to a report.
The findings were based on an analysis of data from more than 220,000 people conducted by UCL.
The researchers said the reason why is unknown, but could include smoking causing permanent changes in the body. The anti-smoking campaign group Ash said the findings should not come as a surprise given the dangers of smoking.
Scientists were analysing data from a set of online experiments in the BBC Lab UK Study, in which people took part between 2009 and 2013. They were sorted into three categories: never smoked daily; used to smoke daily or currently smoke daily.
They were asked how much pain they lived in and this was converted into a scale from zero to 100. Higher scores meant more pain. Current and former smokers scored about one to two points higher than those who had never smoked, the study in the journal Addictive Behaviors showed.
In other words, smoking was linked to living in more pain, even after quitting.
“The key finding is that former smokers still see that effect of elevated pain,” one of the UCL researchers, Dr Olga Perski, told the BBC. She added: “It is a very large data set. We’ve got a good sample, so we can be fairly confident there is something going on here.
“But we can’t say whether that’s clinically meaningful,” And Dr Perski said the most surprising finding was that the higher levels of pain were found in the youngest ages groups (aged 16 to 34). There is no definitive explanation for why this effect might exist.
One proposed idea is that some of the thousands of chemicals in tobacco smoke may lead to permanent tissue damage, resulting in pain. Another is that smoking could have a lasting effect on the body’s hormonal systems.
