Smoking will increase your risk of cancer, emphysema, heart disease, stroke, and dying young, but if you manage to dodge all those bullets, it may actually reduce your need for joint-replacement surgery later in life.
Curious as it may sound, a new study of nearly 11,000 older men in Australia has found that the longer the men smoked, the less likely they were to undergo surgery to replace hips and knees damaged by arthritis or other conditions.
Those who smoked for 48 years or more—the bulk of their adult lives—were 42% to 51% less likely (depending on their age) to need the surgeries than men who had never smoked, according to the study, which appears in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.