This ties to an important fact about how cancer works.
A cell has a long journey to becoming cancerous. It involves cell damage that is imperfectly repaired. A cell once injured is therefore liable to become cancer, but may not take the next step for decades.
When you stop smoking, you stop injuring more cells. But the injured ones are still there. You can think of them as like little time bombs, waiting to go off. A process that is likely to take decades. So even decades later, you should worry.
We convinced large numbers of people to stop smoking. Yay, us! We told them that smoking causes cancer. We were right. But we didn't go around advertising, "If you've been a smoker, you're never getting rid of your increased risk." Because that would have been demotivating.
Maybe we should have still been honest? Then my brother-in-law wouldn't have been so shocked when he got lung cancer from a habit that he had quit some 20 years earlier.
A cell has a long journey to becoming cancerous. It involves cell damage that is imperfectly repaired. A cell once injured is therefore liable to become cancer, but may not take the next step for decades.
When you stop smoking, you stop injuring more cells. But the injured ones are still there. You can think of them as like little time bombs, waiting to go off. A process that is likely to take decades. So even decades later, you should worry.
We convinced large numbers of people to stop smoking. Yay, us! We told them that smoking causes cancer. We were right. But we didn't go around advertising, "If you've been a smoker, you're never getting rid of your increased risk." Because that would have been demotivating.
Maybe we should have still been honest? Then my brother-in-law wouldn't have been so shocked when he got lung cancer from a habit that he had quit some 20 years earlier.