A new study finds that smoking kills half a million Americans each year, with slightly more men than women dying from tobacco-related causes.
Although the rates of smoking-related deaths in men were comparable to that found in previous studies, the numbers for women were higher than expected, the researchers said.
Dr. Brian Rostron, who at the time of the study worked at the University of California, Berkeley, used data from a national health survey that queried a quarter million people about whether they were current or former smokers, and how often they had smoked.
He then followed the participants for 2 to 9 years, and found that about 17,000 had died by 2006, when the study concluded.
Dr. Rostron, who now works for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, calculated the mortality rates for smokers and non-smokers of different ages and genders. He then applied the additional risks due to smoking to the total U.S. population.
The calculations showed that there were 291,000 smoking-related deaths in men each year between 2002 and 2006, and 229,000 in women.
Some 2.5 million people die each year in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among all current and former smokers, the greatest increase in risk of a tobacco-related death occurred between the ages of 65 and 74. After accounting for other factors such as weight and alcohol consumption, people in that age group were three times as likely to die from any cause if they currently smoked between one and two packs of cigarettes a day, compared to those who had never smoked.
“These figures are generally consistent with, but somewhat higher than, published estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, particularly for women,” Dr. Rostron said.
The number of current U.S. smokers has declined in recent decades, with about 7 percent of U.S. adults now smoking more than 20 cigarettes per day, compared with 23 percent in 1965, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The current study was published online March 3, 2011 in the journal Epidemiology. A summary can be viewed here.
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