Health Topic

Quitting Smoking

Quitting smoking is important for your health. Tobacco use is the most common preventable cause of death. Find the best way for you to quit.

Reviewed Reviewed by a registered pharmacistGeneral information

Also called: Smoking cessation

Important: This page is general information, not medical advice. It does not recommend or prescribe any treatment. Always consult your doctor or pharmacist before starting, stopping or changing any medicine.

About Quitting Smoking

Quitting smoking is important for your health. Besides being the leading cause of cancer in the United States, smoking tobacco harms most organs of your body and causes many other health problems.

Tobacco smoke contains many chemicals and can even be harmful even if you don't smoke. Exposure to secondhand smoke can increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. If you're pregnant, it can harm your fetus.

It can be difficult to quit smoking. That's because smoking also causes addiction to nicotine, a stimulant drug in tobacco. Nicotine addiction makes it harder to stop, but quitting smoking can improve the quality and length of your life.

Tobacco use is the most common preventable cause of death. The more years you smoke and the more cigarettes you smoke each day, the higher your risk. Quitting smoking can help reduce your risk of health problems as well as improve the quality of your life.

Some initial benefits of quitting include:

  • Lower heart rate and blood pressure
  • Less carbon monoxide in the blood (carbon monoxide reduces the blood's ability to carry oxygen)
  • Better circulation
  • Less coughing and wheezing
  • Sense of smell and taste return

In the long term, quitting tobacco can help you live a longer life. Your risk of getting cancer decreases with each year you stay smoke-free.

There are many ways to quit smoking. Common methods used to help quit smoking include:

  • Counseling with a health care provider about your smoking habits, readiness to quit, and setting a quit date.
  • Smoking aids such as nicotine replacement products or medicines to help reduce nicotine addiction. These may not be right for you if you are pregnant, breastfeeding, a teenager, or if you have certain medical issues or take certain medicines.
  • Smoking reduction by slowly reducing the number of cigarettes per day, or stopping smoking altogether, often called "cold turkey."

You may need to try different things, but a mixture of counseling and quit-smoking medicine has been shown to be the best method.

Some people think that switching to e-cigarettes can help to quit smoking, but that has not been proven. These battery-operated smoking devices look like cigarettes but work differently. Using an e-cigarette is called vaping. Researchers still have a lot to learn about the health effects of using e-cigarettes.

When you stop or cut back on smoking, you may have short-term effects such as irritability, anxiety, moodiness, weight gain, or trouble sleeping. These are called withdrawal symptoms. You can work with your provider to help reduce these symptoms and find the best way for you to quit.

It sits within Substance Use and Disorders.

The lead U.S. institute for this subject is the National Cancer Institute.

When to speak to someone. Reading about a topic cannot tell you whether it applies to you. Speak to a doctor or pharmacist if symptoms are severe, sudden, getting worse, or simply not going away — and seek emergency care immediately for chest pain, breathing difficulty, sudden weakness or confusion, or a serious allergic reaction.

Research on Quitting Smoking

2,025 studies areregistered for this condition on ClinicalTrials.gov, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's public registry. A selection is below — the links go straight to the registry entry, not to a summary of ours.

What a registered study does and does not mean. Registration means a study exists and has been declared publicly. It says nothing about whether the treatment being tested works, is safe, or is available to you. Many studies find no benefit — that is what research is for. Never seek out an experimental treatment on the strength of a registry entry alone.

Research currently under way

Research already completed

Study data from ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 2026-07-30. Registry entries are supplied by study sponsors and investigators; ClinicalTrials.gov does not verify their scientific validity. PocketsInfo is not affiliated with, and not endorsed by, the NLM or the NIH.

Where to read more

Rather than paraphrase, we point you to the primary sources. Every link below is to a government health agency, a national institute or a recognised medical body — grouped by what you are trying to find out.

Start Here

Treatments and Therapies

Living With

Related Issues

Statistics and Research

Clinical Trials

Medical subject headings

Clinicians and researchers index this subject under Smoking Cessation, Smoking Cessation Agents, Tobacco Use Cessation Devices. These are the terms to use when searching medical literature.

This page is built from the MedlinePlus health topic record for Quitting Smoking, a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health. Information is from MedlinePlus.gov. PocketsInfo is not affiliated with, and is not endorsed by, the NLM or the NIH. Retrieved 30 July 2026.