To lead the way in getting smokers to quit, we’re seeing how much they can puff away.

The number of smokers in Britain is currently at its lowest level since records began. The NHS has contributed massively to the rise in the number of successful quitters through its Stop Smoking Service, which offers help and support as well as prescribed nicotine replacement drugs, to help smokers kick the habit. These services are expensive to run, however, and we are still struggling to get the message of the risks of smoking through to some people.

A new strategy being developed at the moment by the NHS should help further. The initiative is based on providing a smoker with an estimate of their “lung age” compared to that of a healthy individual, calculated using their age and the volume and rate at which they exhale air from the lungs. In this way, a 55-year-old male smoker could be told that his lung function is the same as that of a relatively healthy 93-year-old, demonstrating the effect that smoking has on his lungs.

Primary care researchers have found during trials at five general practices in Hertfordshire that this eye-opening technique more than doubled smokers’ chances of stopping smoking, and even had an effect on resistant people who had no intention of quitting. Of the patients given a calculation of their lung age, 14% managed to quit at 12 months, in contrast to only 6.4% who were given raw measurements of their lung function after breathing into a spirometer.

The calculation of patients’ lung age is also cheaper and as effective as nicotine replacement therapy and face-to-face or telephone counselling. Faced with an ongoing battle to encourage more and more smokers to quit, this is great news for the NHS.