The vital diversity of tobacco control research

Smoking or Health? International Trends and Marketing of Tobacco and Possible Interventions

This article focuses on the trends in cigarette smoking in both developed and developing countries. There is a change in the smoking patterns from developed to the developing countries due to the shift of emphasis upon marketing of tobacco in the developing countries by the transnational tobacco industry. This is achieved due to the tobacco company's advertising strategies and its impact on the population. The harmful effects of tobacco production and its impact on the environment and health levels in these countries is discussed. Intervention strategies for smoking cessation and the benefits of such interventions is also discussed. This article focuses on these changes from a political economic of illness approach rather than just focusing on individual smokers and holding only them responsible for their healthy or non-healthy conditions.

Demographic and socioeconomic links to cigarette smoking

This paper illuminates the demographic and socioeconomic factors associated with smoking statuses. It employs the 1990 National Health Interview Survey's Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Supplement and logistic regression to examine the covariates of smoking status among the U.S. adult population. Polychotomous logistic regression, which provides an alternate way to examine smoking practices, simultaneously considers multiple variables and their interactions, controls for other important covariates, produces predicted values and patterns, and allows multiple comparisons. By examining interactions, we have found that age displays distinct, often curvilinear, patterns with smoking; that compared to females, males have higher rates of cigarette consumption except at the youngest ages; that Anglos, especially Anglo males, exhibit high probabilities of cigarette consumption but also high probabilities of being former smokers; that Black males exhibit high probabilities of light smoking, but only at the older ages, and that they also exhibit high probabilities of being former light smokers; and that Mexican-American females are the least likely to currently smoke or to have ever smoked. By clearly elucidating the demographic and socioeconomic variations in smoking, arguably the most salient marker of health behavior, we can better target programs and policies geared toward the reduction of smoking-related diseases and deaths.

The epidemiology of lung cancer in women

Female lung cancer mortality rates have increased dramatically since 1950, and in 1987 lung cancer surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death among US women. The epidemic in women, as in men, is attributable to cigarette smoking. Smoking prevalence in women peaked in the 1960s and 1970s and has since been declining, although fully 23.5% of adult women were current smokers in 1991. As a reflection of declines in smoking prevalence, lung cancer incidence and mortality rates are declining slightly in women under 45 years old, and it is predicted that overall age-adjusted rates may begin to turn around early in the next century. Survival for the disease is poor; the relative 5-year survival rate for women diagnosed between 1981 and 1987 was only 16% for whites and 13% for African-Americans. This article describes trends in female lung cancer rates by race and age, provides staging and survival statistics, and briefly reviews the evidence on smoking and other risk factors (environmental tobacco smoke, radon, pollution, family history, previous lung disease, and diet) for lung cancer in women.