Tobacco Documents Online

MORTALITY PATTERNS AMONG U.S. VETERANS WHO SMOKE OCCASIONALLY: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS James E. Enstrom, Ph.D., M.P.H. School of Public Health University of California Los Angeles, CA 90024 January 24, 1996 ABSTRACT The relationship smoking-related mortality to five levels of occasional smoking is examined in a cohort of 245,000 U.S. veterans followed from 1954 through 1979. Proportional hazards regression analysis has been used to compare men who used tobacco occasionally with those who never used tobacco with respect to mortality from several causes of death. There does not appear to be a consistent relationship between the level of occasional smoking and mortality. This suggests that there may indeed be a threshold below which tobacco use is not related to total mortality. The nature of the relationship with lung cancer is harder to classify because of large statistical fluctuation, but there is no clear dose-response. These patterns need to be examined in other cohorts.