Many Americans suffer from multiple conditions related to cigarettes
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Oct. 13, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Cigarette smoking accounts for approximately 14 million major medical conditions that plague the lives of U.S. adults, according to a new government report.
"For each annual death, there are 15 to 20 people living with major disease caused by smoking," said senior study author Terry Pechacek, associate director for science at the office on smoking and health of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Smoking not only will kill you, it will damage your health and make your life worse."
Smoking harms nearly every organ in the body, often causing multiple serious illnesses such as emphysema, diabetes and colon cancer, according to the report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the CDC.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is the illness most tightly linked to smoking, researchers report. About 7.5 million U.S. adults suffer from smoking-related COPD, which makes it harder and harder to draw breath as time passes.
But the study, published Oct. 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, also links smoking to:
- 2.3 million cases of heart attack
- 1.3 million cases of cancer
- 1.2 million cases of stroke
- 1.8 million cases of diabetes.
The researchers said their findings regarding diabetes are particularly concerning.
"We've known for quite a while that smoking makes diabetes outcomes worse, and diabetics who smoke are really placing themselves at great risk," Pechacek said. "But if people smoke who have a tendency toward diabetes, are pre-diabetic, they are at a much higher risk of progressing to full diabetes."
"Smoking causes diabetes and makes it much worse," he said. "People are not aware of that."
The study relied on data gathered from two national health surveys from 2006 through 2012 to produce the first estimate of smoking-related illness since 2000, when the CDC estimated that 8.6 million people had 12.7 million major medical conditions caused by smoking.
This time they found that 6.9 million U.S. adults had a combined 10.9 million smoking-related medical conditions. Then they factored in COPD estimates and concluded that U.S. adults had a combined 14 million smoking-related illnesses in 2009.
"The implication is that smoking causes more harm than we previously thought, much of it in chronic pulmonary obstructive disease," said Dr. Steven Schroeder, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco and head of its Smoking Cessation Leadership Center. "When you think about how smoking hurts you, people usually think about deaths first, and then those who are sick. There is much more lifetime illness related to smoking."
Schroeder said he was surprised that researchers found even though women have a lower overall rate of smoking than men, they have a higher rate of COPD. An estimated 4.3 million female smokers have COPD, compared with 3.2 million male smokers.
source : Smoking-Related Illnesses in U.S. Total 14 Million, Report Finds
