That nagging cough and congestion just won’t quit, even though you kicked the smoking habit months ago. New research offers an explanation—smoking may inflict lasting damage to your immune system, leading to inflammation that persists up to 15 years after your last cigarette.
“This is the first time we’ve shown smoking’s long-term effects on immune responses,” Darragh Duffy, who leads the translational immunology unit at the Institut Pasteur and is a study co-author, said in a press release.
How Smoking Affects Immunity
The study, published in the journal Nature, analyzed data from 1,000 healthy French adults between 20 and 69 years of age enrolled in the Milieu Interieur project, a population based study examining how genetics and the environment affect the immune system. Participants provided blood samples and answered 136 questions about diet and various lifestyle factors.
A.C. Dahnke
Author
A.C. Dahnke is a freelance writer and editor residing in California. She has covered community journalism and health care news for nearly a decade, winning a California Newspaper Publishers Award for her work.
