Cigarette Accounts For Most Cancer Deaths, New Study Shows

Cigarette companies have warned consumers for decades that smoking is dangerous to the health, but not everyone takes the label seriously. In fact, a new report said that smoking is the cause of at least 167,133 cancer deaths in the United States - in one single year. That's more than an entire population of Salem, Oregon.

Today, The Los Angeles Times noted that there are 12 categories of cancer that can be blamed on smoking, including cancers of the lung, trachea and bronchus; the larynx; the oropharynx; the esophagus the stomach; the bladder; the kidney and ureter; the pancreas; the colon and rectum; the cervix; and the liver.

That's not all: smoking is also responsible for other deaths due to coronary heart diseases, and even causes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis, among others. The study made by researchers from the American Cancer Society noted that a wide variation in cancer deaths can be traced to cigarette smoking, averaging 29 percent of all states.

Seven of the states in the top ten were in the south: Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, Alabama, and Oklahoma. This is hardly coincidental, though: 95 percent of tobacco grown in the states is produced in the south. The ten states with the lowest rates, meanwhile, are mostly from the North or the West.

ABC News also noted that smoking is generally more common in black men at 35 percent, compared with 35 percent for whites and 27 percent for Hispanics and Latinos. For women, whites have the highest cigarette-linked death rate at 21 percent, as opposed to the 19 percent for blacks and 12 percent for Hispanics.

Demographic factors can also be taken into account: Americans who never attended college are more likely to smoke than those who graduated with a degree - and residents from the south have less education than those from the other parts of the country.