It would be hard to find a person
today that is not aware of the health risks smoking brings with it. Every now
and then a study comes out with a fresh perspective of how these risks have
changed and reminds us why smoking risks should not be ignored. One of those is
a recent large-scale study suggesting that since the 1960s female smokers have
caught up with male smokers in terms of the risks of death due to lung cancer.
The study, which was published in
New England Journal of Medicine,
measured mortality trends during three time periods (1960s, 1980s, 2000s) and
compared the findings with results from historical and current cohort studies
concerned with smoking status. In total, the cohort data included 900,000 men
and 1.3 million women from the US, who were classified as current smokers, past
smokers and never smokers. The key findings indicated that there were gender
differences in how the pattern of the risk of death due to lung cancer among smokers
had changed over the years. Among women, the risk of death due to lung cancer
had increased from 30/100000 in the 1960s to 506/100000 during the 2000s. In
contrast to that, the risk of death due to lung cancer among men peaked during
the 1980s but remained similar among the smokers of 2000-2010 and their past
generation. These findings led the researchers to conclude that the risk of
death was increasing among female smokers and reaching similar proportions to
the current risk of death among male smokers. Although some newspapers have
speculated as to why this may be, there is not enough data in the current study
to verify any of those suggestions.
There
are several issues worth considering when reading about the findings. The most
obvious may be that this study covered an interpretation of findings from
several other studies conducted during different time points and with different
teams. No scientific study is ever perfect, so it is likely that each of those
cohort studies came with their own flaws such as not following up whether the
participants smoking status changed during the course of the study. Similarly,
how smoking was seen and reported in the 1960s may vary from how it is seen
today. Therefore, it would be worth critically considering how participants
were selected, and what measures were taken to ensure that their reporting was
reliable. Nevertheless, it is worth commending the researchers analysing
enormous amounts of data across time periods in the United States. Given that
all the studies were conducted in the US, the researchers managed to circumvent
many obstacles that cross-national studies may have had. However, it came at
the expense of the data being most applicable to Americans. You can read more information here.