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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Excerpts from: Women smokers hit hard by lung disease
By Anita Weier The
Capital Times [09/16/03]
It goes by a relatively new name - chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - but
has an old cause, cigarette smoking, in 85 percent of the cases.
Doctors and officials from the Wisconsin Public Health and Health Policy Institute and the American Lung Association of Wisconsin released a report on COPD on Monday at the State Capitol.
They said that in the past 20 years, deaths of Wisconsin women from COPD - an umbrella term for ailments that obstruct airflow to the lungs, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis - more than quadrupled.
COPD now ranks as the third leading cause of death among Wisconsin women, after cancer and heart disease, said David Ahrens, research program manager for the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center and a co-author of the report.
COPD is particularly devastating because people lose the ability to breathe and end up being homebound, said Dr. Nizar Jarjour, a pulmonologist and a volunteer with the American Lung Association. It is a progressive, debilitating, incurable disease that may be little known because those who have the disease are hidden.The Wisconsin study covered the period 1979 to 1998. In 1979, the age-adjusted mortality for men was six times that of women. But by 1998, it fell to 1.8 times.
More women now have COPD because more women started smoking after World War II, the report said. Women also may have been exposed to more indoor air pollutants, including secondhand smoke, as they joined the work force, the study said.
Women who began and continued smoking in the postwar period fell ill from COPD in the 1970s and 1980s, and died from the disease eight to 10 years later, the report found.
Currently, the age-adjusted death rate from COPD in Wisconsin men is higher than women, but death rates are rising faster for women, and in the age groups under 65, the death rates for women are already equal to or higher than men of the same age.
In the not-so-distant future, COPD may be a predominantly female disease, the study said.
According to the Global Initiative on Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease guidelines, 32 percent of people who smoked one pack a day for 10 years or more have undiagnosed COPD.
The report suggested four effective strategies for reducing tobacco use: increasing taxes on cigarettes, enforcing indoor clean air policies such as smoking bans, using consistent mass media campaigns and making smoking cessation services available.
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