1. Using the negative exponential distribution to quantitatively review the evidence on how rapidly the excess risk of ischaemic heart disease declines following quitting smoking
- Author
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Peter N. Lee, Jan S. Hamling, and John S. Fry
- Subjects
Male ,Exponential distribution ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Myocardial Ischemia ,Quitting ,Review ,Toxicology ,Risk Assessment ,Reverse causation ,Smoke ,Humans ,Medicine ,Operations management ,Sensitivity analyses ,media_common ,Ischaemic heart disease ,Models, Statistical ,business.industry ,Negative exponential distribution ,Smoking ,Absolute risk reduction ,General Medicine ,Abstinence ,Meta-analysis ,Female ,Smoking Cessation ,Risk assessment ,business ,Half-Life ,Demography - Abstract
No previous review has formally modelled the decline in IHD risk following quitting smoking. From PubMed searches and other sources we identified 15 prospective and eight case-control studies that compared IHD risk in current smokers, never smokers, and quitters by time period of quit, some studies providing separate blocks of results by sex, age or amount smoked. For each of 41 independent blocks, we estimated, using the negative exponential model, the time, H, when the excess risk reduced to half that caused by smoking. Goodness-of-fit to the model was adequate for 35 blocks, others showing a non-monotonic pattern of decline following quitting, with a variable pattern of misfit. After omitting one block with a current smoker RR 1.0, the combined H estimate was 4.40 (95% CI 3.26–5.95) years. There was considerable heterogeneity, H being 10years for 12. H increased (p
- Published
- 2012
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