2 ms·
Short answer: no. Longer answer: Logically, the answer should be zero, but it's actually not that simple to categorise either 'non-smokers' or 'a smoking-relat
by d1sxeyes 3y ago
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: Logically, the answer should be zero, but it's actually not that simple to categorise either 'non-smokers' or 'a smoking-related illness'.
Taking lung cancer as an example, approximately 10-20% of lung cancers occur in folks who are non-smokers (defined as 'never' or 'fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime'). Researchers estimate that of these, around 20% are caused by second hand smoking, meaning that around 8-16% of lung cancers are non 'smoking related' in non-smokers. Not all lung cancers result in death.
So if we take the same approach, and consider the 80% of lung cancers which occur in smokers, presumably similarly 10-20% of those would have developed lung cancer regardless of whether they smoked or not, so potentially we would need to say that less than 65% of lung cancers are caused by smoking.
Is it then fair to call lung cancer a 'smoking-related illness', if more than a third of people who develop lung cancer did not do so because they themselves smoked[0] (the number changes to 70% if we consder the folks who hypothetically develop lung cancer due to second-hand smoking as 'smoking-related').
There are also a lot a problems with the methodology here. How do we know whether someone really smoked 100 cigarettes or fewer? Is there any statistically significant difference between people who smoked 100 and 1 000? 100 000? Does it matter if someone smoked all of those 10 000 in the last year (almost 30 a day) or whether they smoked those 10 000 over the past 50 years (less than a pack a month)? All of these things seem to my mind to be problematic and make it impossible to answer your question.
I suppose that means that I was overconfident in my assertion in the parent comment that '7/10 smokers die of smoking-related illnesses'. It was not unresearched (although uncited) and I got this number from this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/26/the-terrifying-rate-at-which-smokers-die-from-smoking/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/26/the-t..., which in turn reported on this study: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-015-0281-z https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291....
However, perhaps I wasn't critical enough in my reading, and instead simply parroted the stat.
[0]: big caveat here is that my ramblings don't consider the possibility that a 50 year-old who would otherwise have developed lung cancer at 80 develops lung cancer as a result of smoking, and lung cancers caused by smoking stop lung cancers developing from other causes.
- jjgreen 3y agoThanks for the considered reply, I've searched for the answer myself and never had any luck. It is strange that all of these studies confidently announce the one percentage and never mention the other, and without the latter, the former seems meaningless.