Cigarettes Put Aussies Out Of Pocket

Cigarettes cost the average Australian smoker about $A300,000 ($NZ365,365) in their lifetime, a new calculation shows.

A South Australian infectious disease physician, Dr Ross Philpot, has run new statistics on the physical and financial cost of smoking.

By 65, the average 20-a-day smoker will have puffed on 400,000 cigarettes, and by the time they die 500,000 will have been smoked.

This costs each smoker about $A300,000, a "sobering" figure that all doctors should remind their patients of to help them quit, he said.

The physical consequences can also illustrated, said Dr Philpot, from the state's infectious diseases services.

"In my three decades of experience, Health Insurance I have noted that an accumulated intake of a quarter of a million cigarettes usually results in at least some cough, breathlessness and wheeze and decreased exercise tolerance," he wrote in the latest Medical Journal of Australia.

"Half a million cigarettes generally causes chronic smoker's bronchitis, with or without some degree of emphysema.. while three-quarters of a million cigarettes makes cancer a distinct possibility."

He said telling smokers these statistics was a "simple and effective" method doctors could use to coerce patients into cutting back or giving up all together.