Cigarette smoking is causally linked to lung cancer, with male death rates increasing 20-fold since 1930, while smoking cessation yields coronary heart disease mortality rates below current smokers.
Cigarette smoking has sociological, physiological, and psychological deter minants related to the initiation and maintenance of the behavior as well as important medical and economic implications. The interrelationship of all of these must be understood in order to control the behavior. Epidemiological studies have proven repeatedly that acute myocardial infarction, sudden death, lung cancer, and other disease processes are strongly associated with cigarette smoking (1-4). Nevertheless, 30 billion packages of cigarettes are sold in the United States each year. Helping people to stop smoking cigarettes presents one of the greatest challenges facing public health and preventive medicine in the United States and other industrialized countries today. The strongest case for a causal relationship between tobacco and any specific disease is for lung cancer. Before 1930, lung cancer was a rare disease, ten times less common than stomach cancer; five times less common than colon and rectal cancers (5). Since then, the age-adjusted death rates for lung cancer have increased almost 20-fold in males. An encouraging epidemiologic finding has been that former smokers have coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality rates well below the rates of cur-
Benfari et al. (Sat,) conducted a review in Cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoking is causally linked to lung cancer, with male death rates increasing 20-fold since 1930, while smoking cessation yields coronary heart disease mortality rates below current smokers.
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