Smoking’s Death Toll May Be Higher Than Anyone Knew
By Richard Harris
The U.S. surgeon general lists 21 deadly diseases that are caused by smoking. Now, a study in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine points to more than a dozen other diseases that apparently add to the tobacco death toll.
To arrive at this conclusion, scientists from the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and several universities tracked nearly a million people for a decade and recorded their causes of death.
As expected, the researchers found that smokers were much more likely to die of lung cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, esophageal cancer, mouth cancer and a long list of other diseases that health officials have previously linked to smoking.
But author Eric Jacobs, strategic director of pharmacoepidemiology at the American Cancer Society, found other causes of death that were also more common in smokers — “things like kidney failure, infections and certain types of heart and respiratory diseases that weren’t previously counted,” he says.
(More on Shots - Health News from NPR)
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