Over the last decade, ACSH has been quite pleased to report on the steady decline in cigarette smoking, especially among adolescents. However, as we re too frequently reminded, not all the news on this front is good. Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, while cigarette smoking rates decline, a growing number of Americans are turning to cigars and pipes instead.
While the adult per capita cigarette consumption rate decreased by 41 percent from 2000 to 2011, the total consumption of non-cigarette combustible tobacco, including cigars, increased by 123 percent in the same time period.
Harm Reduction
The results of the first national survey to measure public awareness and the prevalence of use of electronic nicotine delivery systems (e-cigarettes) were just published in the American Journal of Public Health. The survey, conducted by the American Legacy Foundation, showed that 40.2 percent of Americans have heard of e-cigarettes and over 70 percent of this group believe they are less harmful than regular cigarettes.
A recent Gallup poll of 1,000 adults from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia has revealed that more Americans believe obesity now outranks cigarette smoking as a national health problem.
Although there s no doubt that obesity is a major public health concern, ACSH staffers are worried that the extensive dangers of smoking have been overshadowed by the recent uproar about the obesity epidemic. As the poll revealed, 40 percent of Americans now say obesity is an extremely serious problem to society, while only 30 percent say the same about cigarettes.
Last week, we were less than pleased by FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg s empty boasting about the success of the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This week, ACSH scientific advisor Dr. Michael Siegel, who is on the faculty of Boston University s School of Public Health, does us one better. In a post on his blog, The Rest of the Story, Dr. Siegel evaluates each of the seven FDA actions that Dr. Hamburg claims have been effective in helping to protect public health from tobacco use.
In yet more dismal news from the smoking front, researchers at Cambridge University have found that, compared to standardized feedback, tailored online advice may be no better at helping smokers quit.
The study, published in the journal Addiction, included over 1,700 smokers who were randomly assigned to receive either standardized advice on smoking cessation from a non-profit website entitled QUIT, or an individualized version developed according to participants answers to a questionnaire. Yet the results for both groups were identical: 9 percent of smokers reported that they were smoke-free for the first three months.
Researchers continue to investigate how to help smokers kick their lethal and addictive habit. Unfortunately, two recent studies involving nicotine patches and individualized therapy fall vastly short of a breakthrough.
One such study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, has shown that the nicotine patch is in fact safe for patients to use after being discharged from the hospital following a heart attack or chest pains. The concern had been that the nicotine in the patch might further constrict heart arteries that are already partially blocked.
In contrast with the overall declining rate of lung cancer in the U.S., the rate of death from the disease among women has actually remained steady, or even risen, in some areas of the country. These findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, suggest the limitations of the public health campaigns and state policies typically credited with bringing down the country's overall smoking and lung cancer rates.As recent studies have reported, lung cancer death rates among U.S.
A study just published in the journal Tobacco Control evaluated the effectiveness of the graphic anti-smoking posters that New Yorkers may see when buying a pack of cigarettes. Since 2009, a New York City policy has required that these posters be located at point of sale at all cigarette retail outlets. And the results? "The signs did not help recent quitters to stay quit or stop smokers from purchasing cigarettes at the current convenient store," the authors report.
A recent study published in the Archives of Dermatology is giving smokers another reason to quit: cigarette smoking has been associated with an increased risk of a type of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham in England conducted a meta-analysis that included 25 observational studies and found that current smokers had a 50 percent increased risk of squamous cell skin cancer. Among those who had already kicked the habit, the increased risk of the disease was still present, but at a reduced rate of about 20 percent.
And speaking of tobacco harm reduction, we've just learned that a proposal to ban e-cigarettes in New York was introduced in the State Senate. While no one thinks that the bill will become law in the near future, Long Island Republican Kemp Hannon, the Senate Health Committee chair who proposed it, says that he did it "to get some discussion going." Hannon says that, by gauging the reactions of people for and against a total ban, as well as gathering information "that would provide a rational basis for action or inaction," the Health Committee can decide where to go from there.
Even smokers over the age of 80 can still benefit from quitting, suggests a new analysis in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany have found that it s not just young smokers who can reduce their risk of mortality by quitting; the risk of death drops significantly when older adults stop smoking, too.
This week, two studies presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons examined the effects of smoking on joint replacements of the knee and the hip. In both instances, the researchers found, the failure rate was significantly higher in smokers. In fact, patients who smoked before and/or after a total knee replacement (TKR) had a 10-fold higher failure rate of their replacement joints than did non-smokers: 10 percent among the smokers versus just 1 percent in the non-smokers.