Smoking is Associated With Impaired Long-term Quality of Life in Elderly People: A 22-year Cohort Study in NIPPON-DATA 90.

BACKGROUND

Whether smoking is associated with worse quality of life (QoL) or not is relatively controversial. The current study is to investigate the relationship between smoking and subjective QoL in a long cohort study.

METHODS

The NIPPON DATA 90 project collected 8,383 community residents in 300 randomly selected areas as baseline data in 1990, administered four follow-up QoL surveys, and evaluated mortality statistics. We conducted multinomial logistic regression analysis to compare past smokers and current smokers to never smokers, with impaired QoL and mortality as outcomes.

RESULTS

In four follow-ups, QoL data was collected from 2,035, 2,252, 2,522, and 3,280 participants in 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2012, respectively. In the 1995 follow-up, current smoking at baseline was not associated with worse QoL. In 2000 and 2005 follow-ups, smoking was significantly associated with worse QoL (odds ratio [OR] 2.1; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.33-3.36 and OR 2.29; 95% CI, 1.38-3.80, respectively). In the 2012 follow-up, smoking was not associated with QoL. Sensitivity analysis did not change the result significantly.

CONCLUSION

In this study we found that baseline smoking was associated with worse QoL in long-follow-up.