The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: We will highlight revealing new assessments of cumulative tobacco smoke exposure associations with major disease and death rate disparities and burdens locally to globally.

Methods: Local to global smoke exposure and death and disease rate assessments, novel smoke overload/death rate time-series, cohort, and cross-sectional associations, cohort and other studies in Asians, and systematic reviews will be presented.

Results: Very large smoke exposure, disease, and death rate disparities exist between regions and nations globally and between places, races, and other strata within nations. The disease disparities are strongly associated with smoke exposure, especially newer, better proxies for cumulative tobacco smoke overexposure (smoke overload), with a few exceptions. The findings suggest that most chronic disease treatments in Americans, British doctors, Koreans, Indians, and many others through 2002 were likely no more life-saving than lung cancer treatments.

Limitations of previous studies could be contributing to the likely ineffectiveness of many treatments to date. Many treatment randomized clinical trials (RCT) have not controlled for initial smoking status, let alone comprehensively measured intra-trial smoke exposure. Chronic disease RCT seldom have included anything better than convenience sample, often likely relatively lightly smoke exposed, subjects.