When you quit smoking, your whole body reaps the benefits – not just your lungs. In an article for Northern Virginia Magazine, Joshpaul Jolly, MD, explains that within an hour of quitting smoking, your heart rate and blood pressure improve. Within a year, people with COPD start to see improvement in symptoms. People cough less, have less shortness of breath, and may have less mucus production.
“It’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting smoking, even if you’ve been smoking for decades,” wrote Dr. Jolly, a board-certified pulmonologist who sees patients at the Kaiser Permanente Caton Hill Medical Center. “I encourage you to talk to your doctor about different approaches to help, such as nicotine replacement therapy. The nicotine patch and nicotine gum can work very well; patients should learn from a doctor how to best use this therapy.”
Kaiser Permanente members can talk with wellness coaches trained to help people quit smoking.
Dr. Jolly also wrote that patients are more likely to survive lung cancer if it is diagnosed and treated early. Early screening is vital to increasing the survival rate from lung cancer: The five-year survival rate is up to 60 percent if treated before it has spread.
In the United States, lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer deaths. Only 16 percent of people are diagnosed at Stage I, when the cancer is more responsive to treatment. At Kaiser Permanente, our focus on collecting smoking history gives us the information we need to screen more at-risk patients for lung cancer and catch cancer in the earlier and more treatable stage. Nearly 40 percent of Kaiser Permanente patients with lung cancer are diagnosed at Stage I; often, patients can be treated with surgery and radiation and do not need chemotherapy.