Suicide added to list of smoking dangers

To the long list of ways that smoking can kill you, experts should add one more cause of death — suicide. So say some readers of the New England Journal of Medicine.

In February, three researchers saw a report in the journal that examined more than 100,000 deaths among smokers and former smokers who participated in one of five long-term health studies.

The analysis concluded that the 21 diseases officially tied to smoking accounted for only 83 percent of the observed deaths. Most of the other deaths could be blamed on conditions such as hypertension, liver cirrhosis and rare cancers, all of which were more likely to afflict smokers than nonsmokers, the study said.

The authors of that report noted that “a small proportion” of smokers’ deaths were due to suicide. But they dismissed the idea that there was any true link between the two.

But Dr. Jitender Sareen, Karver Zaborniak and Margaret Green, of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, tracked down the supplementary data and came to a different conclusion about smoking and suicide risk.

Women who smoked were 4.4 times more likely to kill themselves compared with women who had never smoked, the data showed. Among men, smokers were 3.2 times more likely to commit suicide than were men with no history of smoking.

The risk ratios were greater than the increases reported for many other causes of death that the study cited, the Canadians wrote in a letter published in the journal Wednesday.

For instance, smokers were 2.2 to 2.5 times more likely than nonsmokers to die of infections and 1.9 to 2.1 times more likely to die of kidney failure.

Smoking was also associated with a 30 per cent increased risk of fatal breast cancer and a 40 per cent increased risk of fatal prostate cancer.

Among the 11 life-ending conditions the study authors linked to smoking, only one — ischemic disorders of the intestines — had a higher risk ratio for both men and women than suicide.