[Proportion of disease attributable to tobacco in the province of Granada].

BACKGROUND

Smoking is the main cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in Europe. The effect of smoking is not constant with the diseases related to it. The goal of this study is to estimate poblational etiologic fractions (PEF), as the proportion of disease attributable to smoking in the reference population, for those disease clearly related to smoking in Granada.

METHODS

The PEF depend upon relative risk (RR) and the proportion of exposed subjects in the target population. Meta-analytic procedures, following the Woolf's method, were applied to estimate weighted RR between smoking and each one of the diseases studied. A survey on a random sample of all Granadian population to assess the prevalence of smoking was performed.

RESULTS

The PEF were always higher for males than for females. In males, the highest figures were for lung cancer (85%) and chronic obstructive lung disease (84%); whilst in females lung cancer and peripheral artery disease reached the greatest figures, 55% and 51%, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS

The figures obtained outline the need for improving antismoking campaigns and allow to quantify the maximum potential benefit to be got if smoking was quit by the Granadian population.