Tobacco may cause more deaths than currently estimated
A new study suggests that current estimates significantly underestimate the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking. The Surgeon General estimates that each year, smoking kills about 480,000 Americans. The study, led by American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers, suggests that cigarette smoking may kill tens of thousands more from diseases that are not currently counted as caused by smoking.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the study included data from nearly a million U.S. men and women 55 or older enrolled in five U.S. cohort studies (the ACS’s Cancer Prevention Study-II, the Nurses’ Health Study, the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, the Women’s Health Initiative, and the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study). During the approximately 10 years the cohorts were followed, there were over 180,000 deaths. Researchers found current smokers, as expected, had death rates nearly three times higher than never smokers. The majority of excess deaths in smokers were due to diseases that are established as being caused by smoking, including 12 types of cancer, coronary heart disease and stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). But investigators found that about 17% of the excess deaths in smokers were due to diseases that have not yet been officially established by the U.S. Surgeon General as caused by smoking, and so are not counted in estimates of the death toll from smoking.