Sex and Money can’t protect from Smoking Diseases

The people’s social background and their gender can’t save them from smoking diseases. Among all smokers and nonsmokers, cigarette smoking has the same negative effect.
Those people who are more indifferent about smoking effects are more attacked by cigarettes smoking than others, reported scientists.

Scientists followed 15,000 people from Scotland over a 28-year period, comparing gender, class, smoking habits and survival rates. They gave to all participants a questionnaire about themselves, including smoking habit, area of residence and occupation.

Class groups were organized into four levels: highest (classes I and II), class III non-manual, class III manual, and lowest (classes IV and V).

Based on their questionnaire response, people were classed as current smokers (smoking within the past year), former smokers (stopped smoking at least a year ago) or never smoked. Participants also had a physical examination that included measuring their height and weight, lung capacity, blood pressure and cholesterol level.

The researchers examined participants for 28 years, collecting data on deaths from the General Register Office for Scotland.

Statistical analysis was used to look at relative death rates among smokers in the different social classes and deprivation categories. Analyses took into account factors that could affect results, such as age, blood pressure, body mass index, cholesterol levels and lung capacity.

At the end of this study, scientists found that smokers of all social classes had a much higher risk of premature death than even the poorest non-smokers. The study also found that the survival rates of people that gave up smoking in the long-term were closer to those of people who had never smoked than to current smokers. They also found that women who smoked had lower survival rates than men who had never smoked in all except the lowest social class groups.

The researchers conclude that people who have never smoked have much better survival rates than smokers in all social classes. Smoking was a greater source of differences in death rates than social class, and eradicated women’s survival advantage (which means women generally have longer lives than men).

This recent study has provided more evidence about the dangers of smoking, and illustrates that these dangers significantly affect people of all social classes. These results show that social status cannot protect against smoking-related health problems, and should provide further motive for all smokers to give up.