Intended for healthcare professionals

Letters

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

BMJ 2000; 320 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.320.7226.53 (Published 01 January 2000) Cite this as: BMJ 2000;320:53
  1. Mary Shaw, Economic and Social Research Council research fellow,
  2. Richard Mitchell, research fellow,
  3. Danny Dorling, reader
  1. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1SS

    EDITOR—Studies investigating the impact on mortality of socioeconomic and lifestyle factors such as smoking tend to report death rates, death rate ratios, odds ratios, or the chances of smokers reaching different ages. These findings may also be converted into differences in life expectancy. We estimated how much life is lost in smoking one cigarette.

    Our calculation is for men only and based on the difference in life expectancy between male smokers and non-smokers and an estimate of the total number of cigarettes a regular male smoker might consume in his lifetime. We derived the difference in life expectancy …

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