Chest
Clinical InvestigationsCOPDSmoking Prevalence, Smoking-Related Lung Diseases, and National Tobacco Control Legislation
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
Smoking prevalence figures for the period 1960 to 1977 were obtained from surveys by Suomen Gallup plc,16 and for the period 1978 to 2000 from the annual surveys conducted by the National Public Health Institute.35 The surveys performed from 1960 to 1973 have smoking prevalence information listed only by gender, whereas the surveys from 1974 to 1977 have ample background information on the respondents including age, occupation, length of education, income, and place of residence. There are no
Results
To analyze the time trends, the following predictor terms were entered in the model for men: the intercept (the mean prevalence); an indicator variate for the year when the Tobacco Act was passed (1976); a linear and quadratic polynomial term for the calendar year; and an interaction (product) term for the indicator and the polynomial terms. The proportion of daily smokers among Finnish men declined monotonously from 58 to 32% between 1960 and 1983, after which the decline slowed down (Fig 1).
Discussion
In the Finnish statistics that were studied, lung cancer incidence and mortality from respiratory diseases declined with the decreasing prevalence of smoking among men. The occurrence of these diseases from 1980 to 2000 were related to smoking prevalence 20 years earlier (ie, from 1960 to 1980), a period that includes the year 1976, in which the Tobacco Act was passed by parliament. These data permitted an examination of the relationship between the factors noted above.
The analysis indicated
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank Kristian Taskinen, MSc, and Lotta Autio, MD, for their help in the collection and processing of the data. We also thank Tuula Nurminen for her advice in the statistical modeling.
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This study was financed by a grant from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Helsinki, Finland.