It s a grim, unwelcome milestone for gender equality. Two new studies survey the toll cigarette smoking takes on American lives and it turns out tobacco-related deaths have become as common for women as for men.
Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the first study examined mortality rates across three time periods (1959 1965, 1982 1988, and 2000 2010) for hundreds of thousands of participants in a cohort of studies. Authors Michael Thun, MD, of the American Cancer Society, and colleagues found that smoking posed a relative risk of death of 2.8 percent for men and 2.76 for women.
Male and female smokers had a nearly identical risk of death from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease, any type of stroke, or any cause whatsoever.
The authors write, This finding is new and confirms the prediction that, in relative terms, women who smoke like men die like men.
The toll of smoking is now an equal-rights-for-all topic, says ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross sarcastically. Women are suffering the same smoking-related deaths and chronic illnesses.
In the second study, Prabhat Jha, MD, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Global Health Research, and colleagues, analyzed health data from more than 200,000 Americans, finding that smokers give up an average of a decade of life. But they get most of that back if they quit smoking before age 35. "The good news is, because the risks are so big, the benefits of quitting are quite substantial," says Dr. Jha.
Dr. Ross notes that, sadly, while bemoaning the fate of smokers, none of the New England Journal of Medicine articles even address the issue of helping more addicted smokers quit. Given the stagnation of the decline in smoking rates over the past few years and the abysmal failure of FDA-approved methods to help, the pervasive evasion of tobacco harm reduction measures that might ease smoking s toll should no longer be accepted by the public health authorities, nor by the peer-reviewed journals.