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Smoking kills 66 Australians daily: Study

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A world-leading study has labelled smoking ‘Australia’s biggest killer’, with the new research attributing the habit to 24,000 deaths across the country each year.
 
Lead author of the Australian National University study, Associate Professor Grace Joshy, said the first-of-its-kind research reveals smoking is responsible for the deaths of more than 66 Australians a day – significantly more than previously thought.
 
The study followed a sample group of more than 178,000 people aged 45 and over from 2005–09 and followed up with the participants until 2017.
 
Chair of the RACGP’s Smoking Cessation Guidelines’ Expert Advisory Group, Professor Nick Zwar, said the smoking study results ‘suggest we’ve always been underestimating the toll of death and illness’.
 
He said the findings are ‘a wake-up call’ to the severity and endurance of smoking’s impact.
 
‘We tended to think “well, smoking is solved, smoking’s not such a problem anymore”, we’ve now got obesity or sedentary behaviours or whatever else to focus on as our key public health issue,’ Professor Zwar told newsGP.
 
‘And yes, those things are important, but you’ve got 24,000 Australians dying prematurely from smoking-related disease.
 
‘That’s a wake-up call that the problem is not solved, and we need to continue to work on helping people not to start smoking, and for people who are smokers, to help them to stop.’
 
The research identified 23 common causes of death due to smoking and found one in four deaths of people aged 45–74 in Australia are attributable to smoking.
 
Compared to those who had never smoked, people who smoke are currently:

• 36 times more likely to die of chronic lung disease
• 18 times more likely to die of lung cancer
• twice as likely to die from stroke or heart disease
• 60% more likely to die of dementia.

Associate Professor Joshy said after being a world leader in tobacco control, Australia is now at risk of lagging behind.
 
‘It’s difficult to imagine the community accepting 24,000 preventable deaths a year from just about anything else,’ she said.
 
According to the study, many people still underestimate the damage smoking has done to their health.
 
It highlighted that smoking between one and 14 cigarettes per day increases the risk of dying from chronic lung disease more than 20-fold, and the risk of dying from lung cancer more than 10-fold.
 
Last year, the RACGP released its ‘Supporting smoking & vaping cessation: A guide for health professionals‘, designed to walk GPs through how best to support patients stopping smoking and vaping, prescribing, support tools, and evidence-based risks and assessments.
 
In the wake of the new data, Professor Zwar said nicotine vapes are still useful quitting aids ‘for people who have tried other approaches and not succeeded’.
 
‘There’s a role for discussing that opportunity, with the caveats around the lack of information on long-term safety,’ he said.
 
‘It’s a short-term strategy to get off tobacco completely, and then the aim is to get off vapes, all forms of nicotine. So, it’s not just putting people onto vapes and saying, “that’s okay forever”. It’s a transition to being nicotine free.’
 
Professor Zwar said it is important for GPs to remember that while not every conversation will result in a patient quitting, some will.
 
‘Everybody has had disappointments there,’ he said. ‘But if all of the GPs in the country advise every patient to quit and offer those people that are nicotine dependent smoking cessation therapy, it’s actually quite a large number of extra people that would have quit a year later’.
 
‘We ask when they first come in, but then the chances of relapse are biggest in the first two years.
 
‘Particularly in that first period of time while people are going through the process, quite a few will have unsuccessful quit attempts, and it’s important to update that documentation.’

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cancer smoking smoking cessation

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