Tobacco Warning Saves 8 Million Lives from Smoking

How many lives can a simple warning save? According to a new study, it's about 8 million. Researchers have discovered that anti-smoking measures that began 50 years ago this month have had a huge impact on the health of people across the United States.

In order to calculate how many people have been saved by the groundbreaking report from the Surgeon General outlining the deadly consequences of tobacco use, the researchers employed mathematical models. More specifically, they used data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics from 1965 to 2009. This allowed them to recreate smoking life history summaries for groups born each year starting in 1890. This allowed the scientists to estimate the impact of alternative scenarios for what might have occurred had the era of tobacco control never happened.

"An estimated 31 percent of premature deaths were avoided by this effort, but even more encouraging is the steady progress that was achieved over the past half-century, beginning with a modest 11 percent in the first decade to 48 percent of the estimate what would have seen from 2004 to 2012 in the absence of tobacco control," said Theodore Holford, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Today, a 40-year-old man can expect on average to live 7.8 years longer than he would have in 1964, and 30 percent of that improvement can be attributed to tobacco control."

The fact that this warning had such a huge impact on health shows how crucial it was to the public. The report has since spawned numerous other efforts at various levels of government to curb smoking. This includes the Surgeon General's warning on the side of cigarette packages, as well as increased taxation, restrictions on advertising and limiting public areas where people can smoke.

"Tobacco control has been a great success story for public health," said Holford in a news release. "We have essentially cut in half the number of tobacco-related deaths each year compared to what would have occurred in the absence of this effort. This is very encouraging, but the halfway point also means that there is more to be done."

The findings are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.