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Studies of Smoking and Death in India

This is the first major study to be completed on how smoking causes death in India. It compared the smoking habits of 43,000 men who had died of various diseases in the late 1990s with the habits of 35,000 living men. More than 4000 of these deaths were from TB, but if the smokers had had the same low risks as non-smokers there would have been fewer than 2000 TB deaths. Few women in south India smoke, so the study was only of men.

Our team

  • Richard Peto
    Richard Peto

    Emeritus Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology

Funding


Selected publications

Related research themes

Prospective studies
Prospective studies
The link between smoking and lung cancer was originally discovered by Sir Richard Doll in 1956. Sir Richard Peto has continued to study the impact of tobacco of global health (see video). Smoking cigarettes is a leading cause of premature death worldwide. There were about 100 million deaths from tobacco in the 20th century, most in developed countries. If current smoking patterns persist, it is estimated that tobacco will kill about 1 billion people this century, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, and about half of these deaths will occur before age 70.
Smoking