The free cessation drugs finally are available almost five years after Congress ordered them. The free medicines are part of a wider smoking cessation program that lawmakers told the Department of Defense to establish under provisions of the fiscal 2009 defense authorization act.

The same law also directed Tricare to boost long-standing smoking cessation efforts with in-person counseling, access to print and web-based material on health effects of tobacco and a 24-hour, toll-free “quit line” with counselors to assess readiness of smokers to quit and recommend ways to address their nicotine dependency.

The smoking cessation program, including mail-order drugs, patches, gums, lozenges and sprays, is not available to beneficiaries eligible for Medicare, which means the Tricare for Life population. This is set in law to hold down costs. It also is not available outside the United States except to active duty members and families enrolled in Tricare Prime overseas.

The toll-free quit line likely will not be available overseas because of “technological barriers and costs involved in providing this service,” Tricare officials explained in a final rule published in the Federal Register Feb. 27.

Free mail-order drugs include heavily promoted medicines such as varenicline (brand name Chantix) and buproprion (Zyban) and popular nicotine replacement including patches and inhalers. All of them will require a prescription and “we can’t guarantee that every med will be available to every individual,” said a Tricare official. “That’s still a doctor’s call based on the person’s health and other medications.”

Read the rest of this article at its original location>

Smoking until middle age does reduce lifespan somewhat — women in the study who smoked until age 40 were about 1.2 times more likely to die over a 12-year period, compared with those who never smoked.

However, those who smoked their whole lives were nearly three times more likely to die over that same time period, compared with those who never smoked.

In other words, women who stopped smoking by age 40 were able to avoid about 90 percent of their excess risk of dying from smoking, the researchers said. And those who stopped smoking by age 30 avoided 97 percent of this risk.

The findings of the study — which involved more than 1 million women born in the 1940s —are similar to what has already been seen in studies of men.

“Women born around 1940 were the first generation in which many smoked substantial numbers of cigarettes throughout adult life,” said study researcher Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford. “Hence, only in the 21st century could we observe directly the full effects of prolonged smoking, and of prolonged cessation, on premature mortality among women,” Peto said.

Participants were enrolled in the study around age 55, and were followed from 1996 to 2011. They completed a questionnaire about their lifestyle, medical and social factors, and were resurveyed three years later. During the 12-year study, about 66,000 participants died.

At the study’s start, 20 percent of the participants were smokers, 28 percent were ex-smokers, and 52 percent had never smoked.

Those who were still smokers at three years after the study began were nearly three times more likely to die over the next nine years than those who did not smoke.

The excess mortality among smokers was mainly due to diseases that can be caused by smoking, such as lung cancer, the researchers said.

The study was published in the journal the Lancet.

See this article at its original location>