Notes on : The Study That Helped Spur the U.S. Stop-Smoking Movement. *https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/the-study-that-helped-spur-the-us-stop-smoking-movement.html

• Per capita cigarette consumption soared from 54 per year in 1900, to 4,345 per year in 1963.
• *I smoked about 5040 cigarettes each year. For the past four years. This increase is high.
• *Using https://www.rapidtables.com for graphing this is what the graph looks like.

Though important, these studies still didn’t make a convincing enough case as they relied on the self-reported smoking habits of people who already had lung cancer, and compared them to those who didn’t.

E. Cuyler Hammond, Ph.D., and Daniel Horn, Ph.D., scientists working for the American Cancer Society, started work on what is known as a cohort study.

In January 1952, Hammond and Horn engaged 22,000 American Cancer Society volunteers to help recruit a large group of American men aged 50 to 69 across 10 U.S. states and ask these men about their smoking habits. The scientists ended up with a cohort of about 188,000 men, who they eventually followed through 1955.

After following the men for about 20 months, Hammond and Horn had enough information to publish what they called “preliminary” findings in an August 7, 1954 Journal of the American Medical Association article. Their conclusion was clear: “It was found that men with a history of regular cigarette smoking have a considerably higher death rate than men who have never smoked or men who have smoked only cigars or pipes,” the researchers wrote.

After his success with the first cohort study, Hammond and the American Cancer Society in 1959 started a larger and more robust long-term follow-up study, called Cancer Prevention Study I (CPS-I). This time, 68,000 volunteers, across 25 states, recruited more than 1 million men and women.

The creation of that landscape-altering report began with a letter sent to President John F. Kennedy in June 1961.

“The principal data on the death rates of smokers of various types and of nonsmokers come from 7 large prospective studies of men,” according to the 1964 surgeon general’s report. These studies, when combined, consisted of data from 1,123,000 men, more than half of whom came from the American Cancer Society’s Hammond-Horn Study and Cancer Prevention Study-I.

Though it took many years after smoking started to decline for the lung cancer death rate to begin to come down, over time, it did — dramatically so for men. In men, lung cancer death rates have declined about 34% from their peak in 1990. In women, lung cancer death rates did not begin to decrease until 2003 because women started smoking in large numbers about 2 decades later than men. The lung cancer death rate among women is now 9% less than it was at its peak in 2002 and is expected to continue declining.

“Nearly half a million Americans and 6 million people worldwide will die from tobacco use in 2014 — but we know what to do to stop that,” Glynn says.