Smoking is not good for people’s health, everybody knows this but they continue to smoke more and more everyday. In a recent study, Finnish researchers reported that men who smoke not only die younger but they have a poorer quality of life than those who never smoked. The quality life of ex-smokers continues to be bad even after quitting. In fact, heavy smokers typically have the health-related quality of life of someone 10 years older than themselves, the researchers added.

Dr. Arto Y. Strandberg, a researcher from the University of Helsinki, said: "An especially large negative effect was seen for heavy smokers who lost about 10 years of their life expectancy, and those who survived experienced a significant decline in their quality of life." For the study, Strandberg's team collected data on 1,658 men born between 1919 and 1934 and interviewed in 1974. The researchers found that over 26 years of follow-up, 372 men had died. Men who had never smoked lived an average of 10 years longer than men who smoked more than 20 cigarettes a day.

Compared with smokers, the life quality of non-smokers is better. Especially significant differences were seen in physical functioning, general health, vitality and bodily pain, reported researchers. They observed also that the quality of life was worse even among men who stopped smoking.

"On the individual level, the bad news is that while beneficial compared to continued smoking, cessation of smoking after midlife could not fully recover the higher risk in mortality and poorer health-related quality of life seen in smokers," Strandberg said. Many smokers think in this way "I want to live now, and I don't care if I die early when I'm old - I really want to live hard, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse," a way which is not correct.

Dr. David M. Burns, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and author of an accompanying journal editorial, said that smoking is no way to live.