Reducing smoking rates to five percent of current levels by 2050 could increase life expectancy by one year for men and by 0.2 years for women, according to global modeling studies published in The Lancet Public Health journal.
Researchers found that if current trends continue, smoking rates could drop to 21 percent in men and about four percent in women by 2050. Along with improving life expectancy, accelerating efforts to reduce tobacco smoking could prevent 876 million years of life lost to death, according to the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries and Risk Factors (GBD) Tobacco Forecasting Collaborators.
The study also indicated that banning cigarette and tobacco product sales could prevent 1.2 million lung cancer deaths across 185 countries by 2095, with nearly two-thirds of these deaths being averted in low- and middle-income countries, which tend to have younger populations compared to high-income nations.
"We must not lose momentum in efforts to reduce, and ultimately eliminate smoking around the world. Our findings highlight that millions of premature deaths could be avoided by bringing an end to smoking," said senior author Stein Emil Vollset, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, US, which coordinates the GBD study.
The predictions regarding preventable deaths came from analyzing how banning tobacco sales would impact lung cancer deaths among people born between 2006 and 2010.
The study also highlighted the potential effects of the "tobacco-free generation" policy, which seeks to prevent the sale of tobacco to individuals born after a specific year. However, this policy has yet to be implemented in any country.
New Zealand's December 2022 legislation to ban the sale of tobacco products to anyone born in or after 2009 was repealed earlier this year.
The authors called for maintaining existing tobacco control policies while implementing new ones to reduce smoking-related disease risks and ensure that the progress made over the past decades is not lost.
Implementing policies like tobacco-free generation laws and banning tobacco sales could be instrumental in reducing the global burden of smoking-related diseases. However, consistent global effort and renewed policy focus will be essential to ensure that the momentum towards a smoke-free future is not lost.
(This story has been slightly reworked from an auto-generated PTI feed.)
