Smoking causes 90% of all lung cancer deaths

Smoking is the Cause of 90% of Lung Cancer Deaths

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Smoking Causes 90% of Lung Cancer Deaths

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Lung cancer is the leading cause of death among both men and women in the United States. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer. It contributes to nearly 90% of lung cancer deaths.

Andrea Villanti, PhD, MPH, talks about lung cancer and smoking – and so much more. Villanti is an badociate professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Vermont. She specializes in understanding tobacco use, including predictive factors and smoking patterns among youth, as well as how to improve decision-making on tobacco control policy and programs, including the science of tobacco regulation.

Read or listen to the interview below: [19659003]

Villanti : Cigarettes contain about 600 ingredients and, when they are burned, they create more than 7,000 chemicals. At least 69 of these chemicals are known to cause cancer and many of them are toxic.

So, when a smoker inhales smoke into his lungs, he puts them in direct contact with their lung cells. damaged by these chemicals. Chemicals also enter your bloodstream, which is why they cause diseases in other parts of your body.

We also see it with exposure to second-hand smoke. That is why some people who have never smoked develop lung cancer after being exposed to a person who smokes in their home or in their environment.

Villanti : In the United States, smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths each year. That's more than 1,300 deaths a day

In Vermont, tobacco is one of three behaviors that contribute to the four diseases that cause more than 50% of deaths in our state. In Vermont, we expect about 390 lung cancer deaths in 2018.

When we think of cancer more generally, cigarette use is responsible for nearly 20% of new cancer cases in the United States. And 30% of cancer deaths. This is 1 in 5 new cancer cases and almost 1 in 3 deaths on cancer.

Villanti : I recently heard that opioids were the main public health epidemic of our time, in the image of tobacco. public health epidemic 20 years ago

The problem is that the tobacco epidemic continues. Its impact on deaths in our state still far exceeds the number of opioid-related deaths. If we take only cancer deaths, smoking was responsible for four times more deaths than opioids in 2016. If we think of other effects of smoking, such as the effect of smoking on disease-related deaths 8 times more deaths than opioid-related deaths

We can not forget about tobacco, but we can not continue to look independently at these tobacco epidemics. opioids and substances. Smoking is closely linked to the use of alcohol and drugs, and both have significant effects on the health of people in Vermont and the United States in general.

Villanti : There are two ways to reduce smoking community. First, prevent people from starting to consume, and then help smokers quit.

My work focuses on youth and young adults, because we can have the greatest impact on the health of the population if we do both of these things in young people. Smokers die about 10 years earlier than nonsmokers. Therefore, if we can convince youth to quit before the age of 35, their experience and survival are very much like those of a non-smoker. They find these ten years of life.

Better yet, if we can prevent youth from smoking, we can avoid the long-term health consequences and medical costs badociated with smoking. In Vermont, the cost of lifetime health care for a smoker exceeds $ 200,000. In fact, we have the 11th highest cost of health care per smoker in the country. Prevention must therefore be a key element of our strategy to reduce these health-related costs and improve the health and life expectancy of people.

solid evidence on which to base our interventions and policies, and we know that a comprehensive approach is the most effective way to reduce smoking. That includes a number of things, such as smoke-free and tobacco-free policies, for which we've done a good job here in Vermont, where we need bars, restaurants, workplaces and restaurants. smoke-free hospitals, where we prohibit tobacco. and use of the electronic cigarette in public schools and at events organized in licensed childcare centers.

We prohibit smoking in motor vehicles occupied by children to reduce exposure to second-hand smoke. We are doing well.

We can also increase the unit price of tobacco products, for example the cost of a pack of cigarettes, and we usually do it through taxes. Studies have repeatedly shown that rising tobacco prices are both aimed at preventing smoking and helping people quit smoking. The higher prices of cigarettes persuade some people to stop smoking altogether, to prevent others from becoming regular smokers and to discourage former smokers from starting to smoke again.

When we limit smoking in public places and increase the cost, we also owe it to tobacco users, and this happens by supporting policies and services of smoking cessation. The Vermont Department of Health operates 802quits.org, which provides free online, in-person and telephone counseling, as well as free nicotine replacement therapies such as gum, patches and lozenges for adult smokers. Vermont has also expanded the benefits of Medicaid to support smoking cessation counseling. The reason why smoking cessation in adults is also important for youth prevention is that when parents stop smoking, especially when their children are young, they reduce their chances of smoking.

Villanti : There are a lot of. One of them is relevant to our state, where we are talking about raising the minimum age for the sale of tobacco products to 21 years. In Vermont, you now have to be 18 to buy cigarettes, cigars, electronic cigarettes, narghile, smokeless cigarettes. tobacco, dip and snuff, but we are starting to lag behind our neighbors and other parts of the country in this region. There are now more than 360 cities and counties and 22 states that have raised the minimum age of tobacco sales to 21 years. This proposal has been proposed here and we have not yet adopted it.

One of the main challenges in this area. According to the policy, it is claimed that young adults get a number of legal rights at age 18. They can vote, they can join the army. They should be able to make a choice, an adult choice, to use tobacco products. And there is two pieces of evidence against this argument that seem to me the most convincing. First, we are seeing changes in tobacco use patterns in the United States, so that initiation is progressing now and more and more young adults are starting where previously only teenagers started to smoke. .

Secondly, the adolescent brain does not mature until around the age of 25. And most importantly, the part of the brain that controls decision making and self-regulation is one of the last parts to develop. So when I talk to young adult dependent smokers, they tell me that they would never have started. They say they did not know what they were embarking on when they started. The idea that smoking is a personal choice is simply not true for young people, especially when it is an addictive substance like nicotine.

Villanti : The term "electronic cigarettes" encompbades a wide variety of products such as vapes or mods or vape or JUUL pens. Some look like cigarettes, others to machines, others to USB sticks. The common factor is that they heat a nicotine solution to the point of becoming an aerosol and being able to be inhaled, but the devices differ in the efficiency with which they deliver nicotine and by the concentration of nicotine and nicotine. aromas in liquids.

The way nicotine is delivered, the likely exposure to nicotine and other chemicals differs from all of these factors, and it is difficult to be able to badess the impact of nicotine and nicotine. an electronic cigarette unless talking about a specific device.

This contrasts with cigarettes, which have been so well designed to offer smokers a consistent experience that the level of nicotine, taste, and time required to smoke a cigarette are about the same. A better estimate of the exposure to this product and its impact on health can be obtained.

At the population level and at the individual level, the use of electronic cigarettes has advantages and disadvantages. If adult smokers turned completely to the electronic cigarette, current evidence suggests that there would be a significant reduction in deaths and tobacco-related illnesses. However, the possibility that e-cigarettes will attract young people and addiction to a new generation of nicotine users poses a risk, especially if this nicotine use shifts from the use of e-cigarettes to e-cigarettes. Use of cigarettes or other combustible products.

Villanti : Nicotine is a highly addictive drug, and smoking is linked in particular to managing the daily stress of a number of people.

When I talk to young adult smokers, I hear about the number of those who have stopped consuming substances. They stopped alcohol, marijuana, heroin, but they do not know how they would react if they stopped smoking. Cigarettes fill so many roles for people. They provide a break from work, stress. They help dictate the structure of the day and the routine of someone.

Cigarette manufacturers have been successful in promoting an appealing and appealing image of tobacco, which highlights the fact that smoking is self-confidence or freshness or rebellion or youth, all that works for sell the product. And let me clarify that the stated goal of these companies is to create consumers for life. They attract young people to their products because they will bring them the greatest profit.

They also have considerable political power. In the 1990s, big cigarette companies were accused of racketeering for covering up the fact that nicotine was addictive, that their products had killed people and that they had known for a long time. There is no other product that, when used as intended, kills half of its users. If it was meat or lettuce that made people sick, it would be immediately removed from the shelves of a grocery store. Yet we have known for more than 50 years that smoking is the cause of lung cancer and a whole host of other diseases.

Villanti : I will tell you that when I was seven years old, my grandmother had a lung removed due to lung cancer and that she was not able to get her lungs. she stopped smoking. . She died of brain cancer at the age of 10 years old. I am doing this job because of her and thousands of people like her who will die of smoking – an avoidable cause of death.

We discussed many policy options that can help. People quit smoking and reduce smoking, and I want to emphasize that doing all of this together is more effective than doing a single intervention. The most effective programs we have seen have used a comprehensive strategy combining all these approaches to reduce the prevalence of smoking.

One of the best things you can do for your health is to not start smoking or start using tobacco, and if you started, quit. When people ask me how to quit or what they can do, I tell them that we have to throw the kitchen sink in there. It's not a thing. Use weaning help lines, tips, medications, get support from your friends and family, and most importantly, be willing to keep trying even if you slip. It's hard to quit, but every try counts.

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