Smoking still causes large proportion of U.S. cancer deaths
A new American Cancer Society (ACS) study finds that despite significant drops in smoking rates, cigarettes continue to cause about three in ten cancer deaths in the United States. The study, appearing in the Annals of Epidemiology, concludes that efforts to reduce smoking prevalence as rapidly as possible should be a top priority for the U.S. public health efforts to prevent cancer deaths.
More than 30 years ago, a groundbreaking analysis by famed British researchers, Richard Doll and Richard Peto, calculated that 30 percent of all cancer deaths in the U.S. were caused by smoking. Since that time, no new estimate of this percentage has been published in the scientific literature. During that same time, smoking rates have dropped, but new cancers have been added to the list of those established as caused by smoking and lung cancer death rates among female smokers have increased.