Tobacco control has saved 8 million lives

A staggering 8 million lives have been saved in the US as a result of stringent anti-smoking measures that began 50 years ago, scientists estimate.
The Yale School of Public Health-led analysis used mathematical models to calculate the long-term effect of a 50-year-old report from the US Surgeon General outlining the deadly consequences of tobacco use, and subsequent anti-smoking measures, over the past half-century.
These cumulative efforts have significantly reshaped public attitudes and behaviours concerning cigarettes and other forms of tobacco, researchers said.
First author Theodore R Holford from Yale Cancer Center and colleagues found that while some 17.6 million Americans have died since 1964 due to smoking-related causes, 8 million lives have been saved as a result of increasingly stringent tobacco-control measures that commenced with the report's January 11, 1964, release.

Of the lives saved, approximately 5.3 million were men and 2.7 million were women. The total number of saved lives translates into an estimated 157 million years of life, a mean of 19.6 years for each beneficiary, the researchers said.
"An estimated 31 per cent of premature deaths were avoided by this effort, but even more encouraging is the steady progress that was achieved over the past half-century, beginning with a modest 11 per cent in the first decade to 48 per cent of the estimate what we would have seen from 2004 to 2012 in the absence of tobacco control," said Holford.

"Today, a 40-year-old man can expect on average to live 7.8 years longer than he would have in 1964, and 30 per cent of that improvement can be attributed to tobacco control. The gains for women have been slightly less, 5.4 years, but tobacco control accounts for 29 per cent of that benefit," said Holford.

Using data collected by the National Centre for Health Statistics from 1965 to 2009, the team recreated smoking life history summaries for groups born each year starting in 1890.
These were used along with national mortality statistics and studies that followed large populations to calculate mortality rates by smoking status.

This allowed them to estimate the impact of alternative scenarios for what might have occurred had the era of tobacco control never happened.
The tobacco warning was released by then US Surgeon General Luther Terry. It is seen by many as a pivotal moment in American public health and as the opening salvo in an ongoing effort to convince people to stop smoking.
While the number of smokers in the US has decreased significantly over the past several decades, there are still an estimated 44 million Americans who smoke, or about 20 per cent of the US population, researchers said.

The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.