Commentary: Tobacco-related diseases: a gender differential?

作者：Eva Prescott · 发表于：International Journal of Epidemiology · 年份：2001 · DOI：10.1093/ije/30.4.793 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Smoking Behavior and Cessation、Air Quality and Health Impacts、Nutritional Studies and Diet

Several of the earlier studies on smoking-related mortality have shown lower risks in female compared to male smokers due to limited smoking exposure in the generations of smokers that these studies were based on. Studies that include many heavily smoking women such as the Renfrew and Paisley Study are therefore welcome. A previous study based on a sample of the population in Copenhagen, Denmark, which also has a high prevalence of smoking among women, suggested gender differences in effects of smoking on cause-specific and all-cause mortality. These findings could not be reproduced using data from the Renfrew and Paisley study in Scotland1 and possible explanations are warranted. The two study populations seem very similar: they were both representative of the general population, they were sampled in the 1970s, they included a large number of men and women of similar age groups and smoking rates were high. In fact, Denmark and Scotland are very similar in that in both countries women took up smoking early in the smoking epidemic and the prevalence of smoking among women is now among the highest in the world.2 In the Danish study population we have found gender differences in smoking-related risk of cardiovascular disease3 and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD),4 but not in lung cancer.5 For COPD similar results have been shown in several studies6–8 although only few studies have used hard end-points and none have used mortality data. Respiratory diseases account fo...