Beware! Smoking may accelerate ageing, says study

Scientists who used artificial intelligence to determine biological age differences driven by smoking have found that smokers age much faster than their peers. Smoking has long been proven to negatively affect people's overall health in multiple ways. 

"Smoking is a real problem that destroys people's health, causes premature deaths, and is often the cause of many serious diseases," said Polina Mamoshina, a senior research scientist at Insilico Medicine in the US.

"We applied artificial intelligence to prove that smoking significantly increases your biological age," said Mamoshina.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, set out to determine biological age differences between smokers and non-smokers. The team evaluated the impact of smoking using blood biochemistry and recent advances in artificial intelligence.

By employing age-prediction models developed by supervised deep learning techniques, the study analysed a number of biochemical markers, including measures based on glycated hemoglobin, urea, fasting glucose and ferritin.

According to study's results, smokers demonstrated a higher ageing ratio, and both male and female smokers were predicted to be twice as old as their chronological age as compared to nonsmokers.

The results were carried out based on the blood profiles of 149,000 adults. Other findings suggested that deep learning analysis of routine blood tests could replace the current unreliable method of self-reporting of smoking status and evaluate the influence that other lifestyle and environmental factors have on ageing.