Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to your Health

Our plain-English summary of Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to your Health, by R. Lugliant.

The study

• Author: R. Lugliant
• Published: St. Mary Medical Center, UCLA
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This document is not a research study. It is a short educational article on the health effects of cigarette smoking, written by the author while Assistant Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Pulmonary Division at St. Mary Medical Center - UCLA. It describes no methods, no study group and no data of its own, and it gives no references for the figures it cites. The article stated that cigarette smoking is the major cause of lung cancer and that approximately 90% of primary lung cancer cases occur in people who smoke cigarettes. On asbestos, it referred to an unnamed study that showed asbestos workers who smoke have a risk 92 times higher than nonsmokers of their age in the general population. That figure comes from other research, not from this article. The article also described other diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and coronary heart disease. The scanned file also contains a separate draft Public Health Service report on dust measurements in asbestos textile plants, which is not summarized here.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Educational article on the health effects of cigarette smoking. It reports no original study, methods or data, and it cites its figures without references.
• Who was studied: No study population. The article is a general discussion written by a physician at St. Mary Medical Center - UCLA.
• Exposure: Cigarette smoking, including smoking combined with occupational hazards such as uranium mining and asbestos work.
• Main results:
  • The article stated, without a cited source, that approximately 90% of primary lung cancer cases occur in people who smoke cigarettes.
  • The article cited another, unnamed study showing that asbestos workers who smoke have a risk 92 times higher than nonsmokers of their age in the general population. This is not a finding of this article.
  • The article cited another, unnamed study showing that uranium miners who smoke have 10 times the risk of lung cancer compared with miners who do not smoke.
  • The article stated that, for smokers, the risk of developing chronic obstructive lung disease is 3 to 20 times greater than for a nonsmoker, depending on age and the amount smoked.
  • The article stated that men aged 45 to 54 who are heavy smokers have coronary heart disease death rates three times higher than nonsmokers.
• The authors' conclusion: The author stated that cigarette smoking is the major cause of lung cancer and the most important cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the United States.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Lung Cancer.

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