The Health Consequences of Smoking

For the first time, women are as likely to die as men from many diseases caused by smoking.

• Women’s disease risks from smoking have risen sharply over the last 50 years and are now equal to men’s for lung cancer, COPD, and cardiovascular diseases. The number of women dying from COPD now exceeds the number of men.
• Evidence also suggests that women are more susceptible to develop severe COPD at younger ages.
• Between 1959 and 2010, lung cancer risks for smokers rose dramatically. Among female smokers, risk increased 10-fold. Among male smokers, risk doubled.

Proven tobacco control strategies and programs, in combination with enhanced strategies to rapidly eliminate the use of cigarettes and other combustible, or burned, tobacco products, will help us achieve a society free of tobacco-related death and disease. 

• The goal of ending tobacco-related death and disease requires additional action.
• Evidence-based tobacco control interventions that are effective continue to be underused. What we know works to prevent smoking initiation and promote quitting includes hard-hitting media campaigns, tobacco excise taxes at sufficiently high rates to deter youth smoking and promote quitting, easy-to-access cessation treatment and promotion of cessation treatment in clinical settings, smoke-free policies, and comprehensive statewide tobacco control programs funded at CDC-recommended levels.
• Death and disease from tobacco use in the United States is overwhelmingly caused by cigarettes and other burned tobacco products. Rapid elimination of their use will dramatically reduce this public health burden.
• New “end-game” strategies have been proposed with the goal of eliminating tobacco smoking. Some of these strategies may prove useful for the United States, particularly reduction of the nicotine yield of tobacco products to non-addictive levels.