Health aNd Fitness Guide

Telling smokers about their ‘lung age’ may make them quit smoking, according to a study in the British Medical Journal. Researchers subjected 561 smokers aged above 35 to a test that recorded the volume and rate at which they exhaled air. While they advised everyone to quit smoking, half of the group were told about their lung age and how quitting could arrest the damage. Saliva tests at the end of one year showed that while 13.6 per cent of the smokers who knew about their lung age quit smoking, only 6.4 per cent of smokers in the other group did so.