Lung cancer mortality at ages 35-54 in the European Union: ecological study of evolving tobacco epidemics

Epidemiological analyses indicate that disease attributable to smoking is a leading contributor to the large gap in premature mortality between the 15 countries that formerly made up the European Union and the new member states from central and eastern Europe.1 However, the prevalence of smoking in most countries has not been measured in a sufficiently consistent way, or over a long enough period, to be used to predict trends in diseases caused by smoking. Lung cancer mortality can provide a useful measure of a population's exposure to smoking,2 3 especially the population segment aged 35-54, when around 80-90% of cases are caused by smoking. We used trends, for each sex, in age standardised mortality due to lung cancer for ages 35-54 to map the lagged effects of the smoking epidemic in the 15 original EU member states and new members from central and eastern Europe, and to …