Smoking Cessation and COPD

Juan: I am Juan from Oakland California. If I stop smoking will COPD go away?

Paul Scanlon: That's a very good question Juan, that's -- the key question that led to a big research study called the lung health study, was one of the biggest lung research study that National Institute of Health has ever funded. We enrolled 6000 people with mild moderate Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and coached them to quit smoking. We got about 40% of them to quit smoking right away and about half of those remained abstinent for the entire five years that we studied then, we compare the people who quit smoking with those who continued smoking.

And lung function -- COPD doesn't go away, it gets a little better when you quit smoking. The big bonus is it stabilizes, lung function stabilizes after quitting smoking, so that whatever impairment you have when you quit smoking doesn't get worse it stabilizes so you can live to a right bold age with only mild to moderate impairment as suppose to people who continue smoking will go on to develop severe obstructive lung disease and who die at a much greater rate of heart attacks, lung cancer and other lung and heart conditions.

So the answer is it doesn't go away, but it does get better and it does stabilize.


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