Smoking and Mortality in China

Smoking is a major risk factor for illness and death around the world. To assess the extent of the risk in China, the world’s leading producer and consumer of tobacco products, investigators used data from a large, prospective cohort study to estimate smoking-related mortality.

The study included 144,088 individuals from 15 provinces who were 40 or older at baseline and for whom follow-up information was available. Subjects’ mean age ranged from the mid- to late 50s. Most men were smokers, and most women were nonsmokers. At a mean of 8.3 years of follow-up, a dose-response association was found between pack-years smoked and death from any cause (P<0.001). In multivariable analysis, men with 30.2 or more pack-years of smoking had a 26% increa…