Okay, I started looking at this a couple days ago but being anally retentive, I had to go a bit deeper. As mentioned on a previous thread, I had looked at lung cancer in 2006 (the latest year I could find any semi-complete data). I decided to revisit it and see what I could find on the other "smoking related" diseases.
The first interesting finding came from the ACS-
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@nho/documents/document/caff2006pwsecuredpdf.pdf
The probability of developing invasive cancer over selected ages chart gave this information-
46% of men and 38% of women will develop an invasive cancer over their lifetime. Now the difference in rates have a lot of confounding reasons but I'd guess that man's occupational difference have a lot to do with those differences.
When you start digging into the various diseases that are smoking related you get some interesting statistics. Using the CDC defined adult population of 45.3m smokers (20.8%), 45.7m ex-smokers (21%) and 126.8m never smokers (58.2% who haven’t had or lied about having more than 99 cigarettes in their lifetime) and the deaths established in the five major categories (lung, other smoking related cancers, heart disease, stroke and emphysema/chronic bronchitis ) you get the following deaths based on the CDC rates by class-
Smokers-______358,020
Ex-smokers-____398,838
Never smokers-__393,483
Now we know they use the 443,00 smoking related deaths (666*666, The number of the beast squared) so I found it difficult to see why they didn’t increase the number based on their own established population and death rates. Was it only due to their own gallows humor registered by the SAMMEC computer programmers or something else? Certainly giving up over 300,000 to the smoking death toll isn’t within their normal SOP for the antis.
Then as I thought about it, I adjusted those numbers down for the smokers and ex-smokers based on the fact that if a certain percentage of the cancers appeared in never smokers that rate should have also occurred in those that smoke or smoked in the past. These adjustments led to the following death rates-
Smokers-_______________________ 217,433
Ex-smokers-_____________________ 257,010
Never smokers and death adjustments- 534,070
Now the smoking related deaths are closer to the numbers they quote 474,000 compared to their cutesy number.
Using the adjusted rates, you still get almost double the chances of dying from a smoking related disease as a smoker (95.73%) and more than double the chance as an ex-smoker (129.33%, maybe we shouldn’t have quit).
Now the individual disease rate compared to the never smoker base breakdown is interesting-
Smokers Ex-smokers
Lung Cancer______ 187.02%____973.90%
Other Cancers_____ 264.28%____189.76%
Heart disease________40.24%____60.47%
Stroke_____________0.29%_____-54.73%
COPD____________551.76%_____223.75%
Smoking obviously has a causal effect on lung and other cancers (without taking into account confounding factors such as work and living environment) as well as COPD. Those were pretty much expected. However there is such a small increase on heart disease that you have to question all the concern about it. Then you look at strokes abd you have to wonder why it’s considered a smoking related disease at all.
Cigarette Smoking Among Adults --- United States, 2006
Also to be remembered is that basically all these deaths are occurring from 65 to 85+, say over a 25 year period. Only 1 in 13 men die of lung cancer and 1 in 16 women with the average age of 71. With a yearly mortality rate of .05% rate for smokers, .19% rate for ex-smokers and .02% for everyone else and basically a 25 year window you have about a 6.7% chance of dying of lung cancer in your lifetime and a smokers chance is 1.3%, an ex-smoker is 4.9% and all others are .5% of that total.
The largest cause of death has been and still is heart disease which is affected less by smoking than overall age. All the other “smoking related diseases” have similar characteristics to lung cancer with the exception to COPD, which is really the disease you should hope to avoid by stopping the inhalation of smoke. That said only about 10% of deaths from smoking related diseases come from this one.
I didn’t bother to try to find annual mortality by age for anything other than lung cancer, but I see the “50% of smokers dying of smoking related diseases” to be another major exaggeration.
The first interesting finding came from the ACS-
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@nho/documents/document/caff2006pwsecuredpdf.pdf
The probability of developing invasive cancer over selected ages chart gave this information-
46% of men and 38% of women will develop an invasive cancer over their lifetime. Now the difference in rates have a lot of confounding reasons but I'd guess that man's occupational difference have a lot to do with those differences.
When you start digging into the various diseases that are smoking related you get some interesting statistics. Using the CDC defined adult population of 45.3m smokers (20.8%), 45.7m ex-smokers (21%) and 126.8m never smokers (58.2% who haven’t had or lied about having more than 99 cigarettes in their lifetime) and the deaths established in the five major categories (lung, other smoking related cancers, heart disease, stroke and emphysema/chronic bronchitis ) you get the following deaths based on the CDC rates by class-
Smokers-______358,020
Ex-smokers-____398,838
Never smokers-__393,483
Now we know they use the 443,00 smoking related deaths (666*666, The number of the beast squared) so I found it difficult to see why they didn’t increase the number based on their own established population and death rates. Was it only due to their own gallows humor registered by the SAMMEC computer programmers or something else? Certainly giving up over 300,000 to the smoking death toll isn’t within their normal SOP for the antis.
Then as I thought about it, I adjusted those numbers down for the smokers and ex-smokers based on the fact that if a certain percentage of the cancers appeared in never smokers that rate should have also occurred in those that smoke or smoked in the past. These adjustments led to the following death rates-
Smokers-_______________________ 217,433
Ex-smokers-_____________________ 257,010
Never smokers and death adjustments- 534,070
Now the smoking related deaths are closer to the numbers they quote 474,000 compared to their cutesy number.
Using the adjusted rates, you still get almost double the chances of dying from a smoking related disease as a smoker (95.73%) and more than double the chance as an ex-smoker (129.33%, maybe we shouldn’t have quit).
Now the individual disease rate compared to the never smoker base breakdown is interesting-
Smokers Ex-smokers
Lung Cancer______ 187.02%____973.90%
Other Cancers_____ 264.28%____189.76%
Heart disease________40.24%____60.47%
Stroke_____________0.29%_____-54.73%
COPD____________551.76%_____223.75%
Smoking obviously has a causal effect on lung and other cancers (without taking into account confounding factors such as work and living environment) as well as COPD. Those were pretty much expected. However there is such a small increase on heart disease that you have to question all the concern about it. Then you look at strokes abd you have to wonder why it’s considered a smoking related disease at all.
Cigarette Smoking Among Adults --- United States, 2006
Also to be remembered is that basically all these deaths are occurring from 65 to 85+, say over a 25 year period. Only 1 in 13 men die of lung cancer and 1 in 16 women with the average age of 71. With a yearly mortality rate of .05% rate for smokers, .19% rate for ex-smokers and .02% for everyone else and basically a 25 year window you have about a 6.7% chance of dying of lung cancer in your lifetime and a smokers chance is 1.3%, an ex-smoker is 4.9% and all others are .5% of that total.
The largest cause of death has been and still is heart disease which is affected less by smoking than overall age. All the other “smoking related diseases” have similar characteristics to lung cancer with the exception to COPD, which is really the disease you should hope to avoid by stopping the inhalation of smoke. That said only about 10% of deaths from smoking related diseases come from this one.
I didn’t bother to try to find annual mortality by age for anything other than lung cancer, but I see the “50% of smokers dying of smoking related diseases” to be another major exaggeration.
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