40 years of U.S. cigarette smoking and heart disease and cancer mortality rates.

This paper reviews some recent studies of the associations between cigarette smoking and mortality rates. It also reports on time series correlation studies of the relationships between per capita cigarette smoking and mortality rates for heart disease and respiratory cancer for the period 1940-1979 for the United States. Major findings tend to support the view that there is a 20 year lag relationship between smoking (especially number of cigarettes consumed per capita) and respiratory cancer mortality, while there appears to be no lag in the relationship of smoking (especially pounds of tobacco consumed per capita) to heart disease mortality. Smoking is found to explain over 90% of the variance in the relationship between smoking and respiratory cancer mortality, while it explains only 50% of the variance between smoking and heart disease mortality.