Smoking Worse Than We Thought?
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JanelleAnn/iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -– It’s known that smokers have a two to three times higher rate of death than non-smokers, but new research suggests doctors may have been lowballing the number of people killed by tobacco.
The new data, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that doctors have been off in yearly reporting by about 25,000 people.
The surgeon general already formally links 21 diseases with smoking, but these diseases do not appear to account for all the deaths believed to be due to smoking.
Several diseases newly linked to smoking cause nearly 20 percent more deaths in smokers, according to the new study.
After reviewing data on nearly 1 million Americans, researchers found increased rates of infections, various cancers, kidney and liver disease, all conditions not previously linked to smoking.
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