Tackshs

An important open access publication compiling data on smoking prevention in 195 countries with participation of Dr Joan Soriano, TackSHS researcher, was recently published in the Lancet.

The data from Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) was used for the study; it offers a robust platform through which global, regional, and national progress toward achieving smoking-related targets can be assessed. The current study synthesised 2818 data sources with spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression and produced estimates of daily smoking prevalence by sex, age group, and year for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. The investigators analysed 38 risk-outcome pairs to generate estimates of smoking-attributable mortality and disease burden, as measured by disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs).

A lot of interesting results could be distilled from the study; we will highlight some of them. For many countries and territories, faster annualised rates of decline in smoking prevalence occurred between 1990 and 2005 than between 2005 and 2015. Intensified tobacco control and strengthened monitoring are required to further reduce smoking prevalence and attributable burden, especially in view of the fact that demographic factors like population ageing are not easily amenable to intervention.

China, India, and Indonesia, the three leading countries in total number of male smokers, accounted for 51.4% of the world’s male smokers in 2015. With regard to attributable mortality 6.4 million deaths were attributable to smoking worldwide in 2015, presenting a 4.7% (1.2–8.5) increase in smoking-attributable deaths since 2005. More than 75% of these deaths were in men and 52.2% took place in four countries (China, India, the USA, and Russia). Overall, in 2015, cardiovascular diseases (41.2%), cancers (27.6%), and chronic respiratory diseases (20.5%) were the three leading causes of smoking-attributable age standardised DALYs for both sexes.

The full text of the article can be viewed following this link.

Image text: Figure 1: Age-standardised prevalence of daily smoking for men (A) and women (B), in 2015 ATG=Antigua and Barbuda. VCT=Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. LCA=Saint Lucia. TTO=Trinidad and Tobago. TLS=Timor-Leste. FSM=Federated States of Micronesia.