New Study Suggests Value of FDA Regulation of Cigarettes

Cigarettes Are Only Real Cause of Lung Cancer, and Kill Half of All Smokers

A new study suggests that FDA regulation of cigarette ads and cigarette sales could help stem an "invisible epidemic" which already kills at least half of all smokers, in part because children are becoming addicted at an even earlier age in adolescence.

The authors said that their study might even have underestimated the death rates due to smoking because it focused on white middle-class smokers, rather than on poor and minority people who have less access to medical care.

The study, in the American Journal of Public Health, says that the rate of lung cancer deaths among smokers have increased dramatically during the past three decades - particularly among women - despite the wide-spread introduction and promotion of supposedly safer low tar and nicotine cigarettes.

According to the study, the rate of lung cancer deaths among women increased 500%, and doubled among men. The study concludes that lung cancer deaths in the U.S. are "largely confined to smokers."

Although the study notes that deaths from stroke and coronary heart disease among smokers dropped during that period, the same drop also occurred among nonsmokers. Thus, concludes the study's principal author, epidemiologist Michael J. Thun, fewer smokers are dying from cardiac problems not because of changes in cigarettes or smoking patterns, but rather because of improvements in emergency coronary care, better dietary habits, and other health measures shared in common by nonsmokers.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the national antismoking organization which helped obtain the FDA proposal, said the new study provides some inkling of what the FDA's proposed regulations might be able to accomplish.

"By reducing the number of children who become addicted, and by increasing the average age at which they become addicted, we could reverse an enormously expensive epidemic which has become strikingly worse over the past thirty years, despite knowledge of the deadly dangers of smoking."

Even a ten percent reduction in teen smoking could save over 1500 hundred lives every single day, says John Banzhaf, ASH's Executive Director.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, September 11, 1995

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CALL: John Banzhaf (202) 659-4310

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