Large-scale retrospective studies of smoking and death in China
With CAMS & CAPM, CTSU has organised the world's largest retrospective study of smoking and death. Five hundred researchers interviewed the families of one million Chinese adults who had recently died, and recorded the smoking habits of 300,000 living adults. By taking as controls these 300,000 (or the 200,000 who had died of causes other than neoplastic, respiratory or vascular disease), we demonstrated that -- ten years ago in China -- about two-thirds of a million deaths/year were being caused by smoking [84]. In Western countries the main way smoking kills is by causing cancer or vascular disease, but in China the main way is by causing chronic lung disease: of the 0.6 million Chinese deaths/year attributed to tobacco during 1990, 0.3M involved respiratory causes, 0.2M involved neoplastic causes, and 0.1M involved vascular causes.
Emerging Tobacco Hazards in China
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