Estimating the impact of cigarette smoking on life expectancy from 1950 to 2000

Estimating the impact of cigarette smoking on life expectancy from 1950 to 2000 In this study, Theodore R. Holford from the Department of Biostatistics at the Yale University School of Public Health estimates the impact of cigarette smoking on life expectancy between 1950 and 2000. The smoking history generator (SHG) was developed by the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) Lung Group to characterize the smoking behavior in a population. (1) It provides estimates of never, current, and former smoker prevalence by age for different cohorts. In addition, it gives estimates of initiation and cessation probabilities, so that one can determine the length of exposure and the time since individuals ceased smoking. Finally, it gives estimates of the distribution of the number of cigarettes smoked per day. These were initially generated for the U.S. but have also been used in other countries. This approach has been extended for use in each state in the U.S. (2)