Smoking, Wrinkling, and Health

The Cheerful Oncologist vents in his blog about the effects of smoking. Excerpt below.

Source: I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel, or a Fresh Tank of Oxygen

In 1994 researchers from Denmark studied the faces of 13,186 men and women between the ages of 30 and 80 and recorded the severity of wrinkling in the right lateral part of the orbit where "crow's feet" appear. They then checked their lung capacity using a standard measurement found in pulmonary function testing and, after stratifying the subjects according to age, noticed a curious finding among current and previous smokers:

...subjects with highest wrinkle scores had on average FEV1/FVC% that was 1.2-1.9% lower than in subjects with lower wrinkle scores. No association between facial wrinkling and airflow obstruction was observed among lifetime nonsmokers.

Their conclusion: Increased facial wrinkling is associated with "airflow obstruction in smokers, but not in never-smokers. The magnitude of this association, however, is small."

Oh, the link between prune-faced smokers and emphysema is "small", eh? That's comforting to know, because God forbid the 3000 American teenagers who became regular cigarette smokers today should have to suffer from having both troll-like faces and lung disease as they wheeze on through life.