Time for a smoke? One cigarette reduces your life by 11 minutes

doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7226.53

BMJ 2000;320:53 ( 1 January )

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Time for a smoke? One cigarette reduces your life by 11 minutes

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Studies investigating the impact on mortality of socioeconomic and lifestyle factors such as smoking tend to reportdeath rates, death rate ratios, odds ratios, or the chances ofsmokers reaching different ages. These findings may also be convertedinto differences in life expectancy. We estimated how much lifeis lost in smoking onecigarette.

Our calculation is for men only and based on the difference in life expectancy between male smokers and non-smokers and anestimate of the total number of cigarettes a regular male smokermight consume in his lifetime. We derived the difference in lifeexpectancy for smokers and non-smokers by using mortality ratiosfrom the study of Doll et al of 34 000 male doctors over 40 years.¹The relative death rates of smokers compared with non-smokerswere threefold for men aged 45-64 and twofold for those aged 65-84,¹as corroborated elsewhere.² Average life expectancy from birthfor . . . [Full text of this article]

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Mortality in relation to smoking: 40 years' observations on male British doctors: R Doll, R Peto, K Wheatley, R Gray, and I Sutherland
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