How dangerous is smoking a little bit?
I was blown away when a friend of mine recounted a story to me once. My friend, while riding the bus one day, noticed one of those ads that UPenn puts up to advertise medical studies. This particular one wanted light to moderate smokers to participate in a medium-term study (three years or something) to gauge the effects of said amounts of smoke intake on people’s health. They offered to pay some honorarium while they did the battery of initial tests. So, he calls up the folks at UPenn and says he’s interested. They take down some demographic stuff, and then ask him how much he smokes. He tells them, “Around a pack a day, give or take one or two.” The nice young lady on the other end of the line replies, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, sir. The study is only for light to moderate smokers. Thank you for your interest, but we can’t fit you into our study. Have a good day.” “Wait a moment,” my friend says, “What is the cutoff for number of cigarettes?” “Well, we consider 1-2 cigarettes a day a l
delmoi : “and the smoking rate is 20%, there should be about 110,000,000 million female non-smokers, if 15,000 of them get lung cancer, then each probably has a 1/7,333 chance or so of getting lung cancer. Then I would suspect that a female smoker has a 1/814 chance of getting lung cancer.” a) it’s 15,000 women dying of lung cancer, each year. b) it seems for females, smoking increases the risk even higher, yet 20% of lung cancers in females occur among nonsmokers, compared to 10% in males. So we need the absolute number of smokers and absolute number of those with lung cancers. Assuming proportionality among deaths per year and total incidence i.e. (annual deaths from lung cancer among female smokers) / (annual deaths from lung cancer among female nonsmokers) = (incidence of lung cancer among female smokers) / (lung cancer among nonsmokers), and assuming 20% smoking rate, of 40 million (smoking) women, 60,000 die of lung cancer
If you had entered ‘smoking risk’ into Google and pressed ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’, you would have arrived at the very wonderfulNational Cancer Institute’s smoking risk calculator. I’m just guessing at your age and the age you started smoking, but it looks like you’re only increasing your cancer risk a little bit – maybe 800% increase – over those like you who have never smoked. That’s right. You’re 9 times as likely to get lung cancer than the general population. Popular specific ways to die from lung cancer – and virtually no one is cured of smoking related lung cancers – include: • Drowning in your own blood after a tumor-feeding artery ruptures into your bronchus • Tumor invades your hip, causing it to fracture while you are walking, you break your neck from the fall • You cannot fill your lung with air due to tumorous obstruction, so you spend your last 3 weeks awake, pumping your diaphragm but moving no air, air hunger feeding t
what’s the numbers on people who smoke who DON’T get cancer. i mean, that’s what the smoker wants to know — it’s nice to know how much one is *increasing* their risk, but it’s also nice to have a number that says, well, out of 1000 smokers, we’re gonna have 200 that get lung cancer, and another 200 or so that die from heart disease, so basically, you’re looking at a 40% chance of smoking directly causin’ you to kick the bucket.* huh, and while i was trying to make an argument about this being a similar calculated risk like choosing whether to, you know, drive an automobile, i ran across this statistic: “Only 26% of smokers live to age 80 — in contrast with 57% of nonsmokers” – from ” CAUSES OF DEATH” by Ben Best which is more along the lines of answers that i believe would be a reasonable response to this question. 75% chance of not making it to 80 years old is probably enough for me to think reeeal seriously about sta
It’s all a genetic crap shoot. My mother, who smoked from the time she was in her early teens, was diagnosed at age 57 with non-small cell carcinoma – lung cancer. She was dead 10 months later. (By the time you have symptoms, it’s too late to treat you.) On the other hand, my grandmother and great-grandmother both lived to ripe old ages in spite of their smoking. My mother met a man during chemo who had quit smoking 15 years prior and had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Total genetic crap shoot.
