According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a significant portion of deaths among smokers — 17 percent — was due to associations with diseases that had not been previously established as caused by smoking cigarettes.
The study used data from five contemporary U.S. cohort studies of 421,378 men and 532,651 women of 55 years or older between 2000 and 2011.
There were 181,377 deaths reported in the study, including 16,475 among current smokers. According to the report, there were associations between smoking and deaths from renal failure, intestinal ischemia, hypertensive heart disease, infections, various respiratory diseases, breast cancer and prostate cancer. For former smokers, the relative risk for each of these diseases declined with increased years of being smoke-free.
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