Overwhelming amount of evidence have shown that smoking is bad for you beyond what you think is imaginable. So if you’re still doing it, you must either hate yourself or just really stupid, but here is another reason to stop smoking, it increases your risk of bone fractures. FYI, bone fractures hurt and can be very debilitating.

In a meta-analysis of 27 research publications over 30 years of almost 30,000 broken bone cases, researchers from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas found that smoking increased the risk fractures in men by nearly 37%, with ranges from 32% to 40%. Additionally, some of these studies show that approximately 21% to 37% of the bone break cases, the patient died within a year.

“Men tend to smoke more than women, increasing their risk for osteoporosis, which has traditionally been thought of as a women’s disease,” said author, Qing Wu.

Cigarette smoking is thought to increase risk of osteoporosis through a whole host of factors from vitamin D absorption reduction to interference to tissue repair and vascular disease, decrease transport of oxygen and nutrients to the tissues.

So stop smoking. Just don’t buy it and just stop doing it.

The researchers published their findings in Scientific Reports.

Y Xu et al, Smoking and fracture risk in men: a meta-analysis of cohort studies, using both frequentist and Bayesian approaches, Scientific Reports.  DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-13356-1