Xinhua, Oct. 09, 2015 – The prestigious medical journal “The Lancet” recently published a study stating that the number of smoking-related deaths in China will reach 2 million annually by 2030, a figure that is twice as high as in 2010. The report said that current trends suggest that one in three young male deaths in China will be attributed to smoking. Fewer Chinese women smoke than men, and therefore die in smaller numbers.
The University of Oxford, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention participated in the study. The study spanned 15 years and included hundreds of thousands of Chinese people.
In 2010, smoking killed 970,000 people in China, including 840,000 men and 130,000 women. Smokers have twice the mortality rate of non-smokers, and are at higher risk of lung cancer, stroke and heart disease.
The report notes that the annual number of smoking deaths in China will increase from about 1 million in 2010 to 2 million by 2030, a figure that will reach 3 million by 2050 unless a universal smoking ban is implemented. For China, a massive smoking ban is the most effective and cost-effective way to prevent disability and premature death in the coming decades.
People’s Perceptions of the Dangers of Smoking
The history of human smoking goes back to the days of ancient Greece. But the earliest record of smoking is a stone sculpture of an old man smoking on an ancient temple in Mexico in 442 AD, indicating that humans began smoking more than 1,600 years ago. And tobacco in China was introduced during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty.
The picture above is a slide photograph, taken with a camera at an academic conference many years ago. The painting is by Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890, also known as “Van Gogh” in Chinese, a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter), and shows a skeleton holding a burning cigarette, linking tobacco to death. Next to it is a 1954 article from the British Medical Journal, a survey of mortality among medical personnel who smoke. This shows that the dangers of smoking were recognized very early on.
In 1928 Lombard and Doering reported that cancer patients smoked at a higher rate than healthy controls, and 10 years later Pearl reported that heavy smokers had a lower life expectancy than nonsmokers, and in 1939 Ochener and Debakey made public their study of the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. All of this did not attract much attention at the time, as more than two-thirds of the medical profession was smoking at the time.
It was not until the 1950s that the medical community began to think seriously about the dangers of smoking through epidemiological surveys. Numerous prospective studies have confirmed that smoking is a risk factor for many diseases, including cardiovascular disease, lung disease and cancer. In terms of cancer, smoking has been identified as a major cause of lung, throat, oral cavity, and esophageal cancers, and is also closely associated with pancreatic, bladder, stomach, kidney, and cervical cancers.
Cigarette smoking and lung cancer
The smoke produced by a lit cigarette contains more than 3,000 toxic and harmful chemicals, the most important of which are nicotine, carbon monoxide, cyanide, many carcinogens present in tobacco tar, radioactive isotopes, and heavy metal elements. Carcinogenic substances produced by tobacco combustion include benzo(a)pyrene, nitrosamines, beta-naphthylamine, cadmium, radioactive polonium, and so on. There are also phenolic compounds and other carcinogenic substances.
Smoking is internationally recognized as one of the most important factors causing lung cancer. The death of smokers due to lung cancer is about 10 times more than that of non-smokers. In China, 70% to 80% of lung cancer in men is caused by smoking, and about 30% of lung cancer in women is attributed to smoking and passive smoking. The earlier the age of smoking, the greater the risk of lung cancer. The mortality rate of lung cancer is about 100 times higher for those who have smoked for 60 years than for those who have smoked for 20 years. Age of smoking is directly proportional to the incidence of lung cancer.
A smoking index of more than 400 years (the product of the number of years of smoking and the average number of cigarettes smoked per day) is a red flag, for example, a young man who starts smoking at the age of 15 and smokes a pack a day may get lung cancer before he reaches 35-40 years old.
The earlier the age of smoking, the higher the incidence of lung cancer and mortality. If the lung cancer mortality rate for nonsmokers is set at 1.00, the mortality rate for those who start smoking under the age of 15 is 19.65, for those aged 20 to 24 it is 10.08, and for those aged 25 and older it is 4.08.
The mortality rate of lung cancer among nonsmoking women from passive smoking due to their husbands’ smoking is 1-2 times higher than that of women whose husbands do not smoke.
About quitting smoking
The World Health Organization has designated May 31 each year as World No Tobacco Day since 1989 to draw the attention of the international community to the health risks of tobacco.
Misconceptions about quitting smoking
1. Smoking cigarettes with filters and low-nicotine, low-tar cigarettes (so-called low-risk cigarettes) can reduce the harm or no harm. Obviously, this is self-congratulation. The incidence of squamous cell carcinoma in male lung cancer patients has been clinically found to be decreasing, but the incidence of lung adenocarcinoma is increasing, which may be related to the addition of filters. Because of the addictive nature of nicotine patients smoke more tobacco to satisfy their bodies. As a result more cigarettes are smoked.
2. You cannot quit smoking suddenly or you will be prone to lung cancer. This is obviously wrong. It takes more than 10 years to quit smoking before the incidence of lung cancer falls roughly to the same level as that of nonsmokers. Many smokers do not have strong willpower to quit smoking and have a high rate of relapse after quitting. When these people really do not smoke, they often quit passively because they lack the pleasure of smoking, at which point the smoker’s body may already have a problem and needs to be seriously examined.
3. I have been smoking for many years, I would have had problems long ago, and some people are fine even if they have smoked all their lives? The relationship between smoking and cancer is a chronic process, usually lasting more than 20 years, so there are always smokers who take a chance. Foreign countries have done a lot of epidemiological surveys and found that 20 to 30 years after smoking is a high incidence of smoking-related diseases. It is never too late to quit smoking at any time.
4. If you quit smoking unsuccessfully, you smoke more instead. After quitting, it is normal to start smoking again; it is part of the quitting process. Usually quitters go through an average of 4 serious attempts at quitting before they successfully quit smoking. It doesn’t matter if you don’t succeed the first time, as long as you keep trying. Each new attempt increases your chances of successfully quitting. As long as you keep trying, you will be able to succeed and get rid of the “cigarettes” for good, without the phenomenon of smoking more and more.
In our clinical work, we found that many old smokers naturally stopped smoking after they got malignant tumor, and they did not need human supervision and intervention, and they quit smoking very consciously, even some smokers smoked more than three packs per day. This shows that when life is seriously threatened by tobacco, when choosing between life and tobacco, tobacco is given up without hesitation, but then it is often too late. So there is no reason why we should not quit smoking early when we are healthy and say goodbye to this undesirable hobby.
On January 24, 2013, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article that, according to a survey of more than 200,000 people in the United States, smokers have three times higher mortality (from smoking-related tumors, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases) and a 10-year shorter life expectancy than never-smokers. However, if you quit before the age of 35, you can get those 10 years back, and you can get 6 years back if you quit before the age of 55.
Smokers experience beneficial changes after quitting, with lung cancer mortality decreasing or approximating that of nonsmokers over 5 years compared to the average smoker (one pack per day). The incidence of oral, respiratory, and esophageal cancers drops to half the incidence of smokers. within 10 years, precancerous cells are replaced by healthy cells. The incidence of lung cancer drops to roughly the same as that of nonsmokers after 10 years of quitting smoking. Cherish life and prevent cancer, starting from quitting smoking.