Smoking intensity (pack/day) is a better measure than pack-years or smoking status for modeling cardiovascular disease outcomes.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Smoking as an epidemiological exposure can be quantified in many ways including duration, intensity, pack-years, recency, and age at initiation. However, it is not clear which of these are most important for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and how they should be modeled.

Study design and setting

Using the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, Cox models for time to incident CVD adjusted for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education category, and income category were compared which included various characterizations of smoking history.

Results

Duration, age at starting, time since quitting, and noncigarette forms of smoking were not independently associated with CVD, whereas baseline current intensity was associated with CVD [e.g., hard CVD hazard ratio 1 pack/d of

SUBMITTER: Nance R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5318261 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature