Can your lungs really heal after you quit smoking?

Short version: Under certain conditions, your lungs can partially recover after you quit smoking, but that doesn’t mean all the damage will go away.
“We used to think lungs couldn’t regenerate,” says Dr. Charlotte Dean, head of the Lung Development and Disease Group at Imperial College London. “But now we know that’s not true. In general, they can recover when you quit smoking.”
The lungs have a significant capacity for self-repair: evolution has equipped them to cope with damage from pollution or infections, whether bacterial or viral. “Because the lungs are essential — you can’t survive without them — they have to have repair mechanisms,” Dean explains.
Still, this isn’t a reason to start or keep smoking or vaping. Both smoking and vaping expose the lungs to toxic particles, and the amount of damage can exceed the lungs’ capacity to repair injury. In some cases, the exposure causes more harm than the body can fix.

People differ a lot: some individuals have lung tissue that repairs more effectively, while others have much weaker repair ability and can develop irreversible damage. Dean warns that even if your lungs generally improve after you stop smoking or vaping, that doesn’t mean all risks disappear. “You may already have caused mutations, genetic changes, or tissue damage, and those changes can affect overall lung health — for example, they can speed up lung decline with age or raise the risk of cancer,” she says.
For that reason, the doctor advises quitting as early as possible. As people get older, tissues including the lungs repair less efficiently — just as bones heal more slowly over the years. A healthy lifestyle can help, too. “Physical activity really matters,” Dean adds. “Just as workouts support muscles, exercise improves the lungs’ ability to exchange gases and deliver oxygen throughout the body.”
So: quitting smoking greatly increases the chances that lung function will improve, but it doesn’t always return lungs to a pre-smoking state. The earlier you quit, the better the prospects for recovery and the lower your risk of long-term complications.
Based on reporting from The Guardian
Photo: pixabay.com