Smoking-Linked Deaths Up Sharply in ‘85-88 Period : Health: Fatalities rose to 434,000 from 390,000, CDC reports. The figures do not include an estimated 37,000 annual victims of passive smoke.

Deaths caused by smoking rose substantially between 1985 and 1988, federal health officials said Thursday.

In 1988, the year for which the most recent data is available, an estimated 434,000 Americans died “prematurely” of conditions associated with smoking cigarettes, up from 390,000 in 1985, the last time the statistics were calculated, the Centers for Disease Control said.

“This study shows that half a million Americans died needlessly in 1988,” CDC Director William Roper said. “Smoking exacts a very great toll on Americans.”

The 1988 figures include nearly 2,500 deaths from lung cancer caused by “passive smoking,” meaning the smoking of others, the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

“Despite the fact that large numbers of Americans have quit smoking and despite the fact that the percentage (of Americans who still smoke) is lower than it has ever been, we are paying the price for the bad practices of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s,” Roper said. Typically, there is a lag time of one to several decades before the onset of many smoking-related diseases.

For persons younger than 55 who smoked during those years, the incidence of lung cancer and death rates from that disease and other chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases such as emphysema are increasing, the CDC said.

Only 29% of Americans now smoke, down from 40% in 1965, Roper said. However, the actual number of Americans who continue to smoke is higher than in past years because the overall population is larger, he said.

Roper predicted that the disease trends would begin to decline within the next decade or later as smokers continue to quit. In fact, death rates from lung cancer and coronary heart disease among younger men and women have already begun to decline, the CDC said.

However, the CDC said that an individual who stops smoking at any age has a decreased risk of premature death from smoking-related disease. “It is never too late to quit, whether people are 35, 65 or 85,” Roper said. “They ought to heed the somber statistics and stop smoking, because it can make a difference.”

The 1988 figures do not include deaths from cardiovascular disease that may have been caused by passive smoking. A recent study estimated that passive smoking is associated with 37,000 deaths from heart disease every year, the agency said.

Also, the CDC said, the latest figures do not include deaths from other cancers, such as leukemia, to which smoking may be a contributing factor, or from ulcers, a condition also associated with smoking.

The CDC noted that the rate of smoking-related deaths for blacks was 12% higher than for whites.

Smoking deaths for men made up 66% of the total, and the rate was twice the rate for women.

“The higher rates for blacks underscore concerns about the higher burden of smoking-related diseases among blacks than among whites,” the CDC said. For example, the average lung cancer death rate from 1980 through 1987 for blacks was 2.3 times as high as that for whites, the CDC said.

The CDC estimated that, in 1988, 1,199,000 potential years of life before age 65 and 6,028,000 before age 85 had been lost because of smoking, with the years of life lost by men being almost three times that of women. Moreover, the rate of smoking-related loss of potential years of life before age 65 for blacks was twice that of whites, the agency said.