Science / Medicine : Passive Smoke Found 3rd Highest Cause of Death

Passive smoking kills about 53,000 nonsmoking Americans annually, making it the third-leading cause of preventable death after active smoking and alcohol use, UC San Francisco researchers said last week. “Passive smoking is a much bigger problem than anyone thought,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine.

In a new report in the journal Circulation, Glantz and William Parmley reviewed the results of 11 studies conducted on passive smoking and found that exposure to other people’s smoke causes about 10 times as many deaths from heart disease as it does from lung cancer.

Based on the study, researchers estimated that passive smoking causes 37,000 deaths a year from heart disease, more than twice the 15,700 deaths attributed to cancers of all kinds caused by secondhand exposure to cigarette smoke.

All the research was conducted on smoking in the home, and Glantz and Parmley noted that home exposure is generally less than that found at work. “Since smokers are much more densely packed in an office than they are in most houses, we are almost certainly underestimating the risks,” Glantz said.