Trends in cigarette smoking in the United States: the changing influence of gender and race

Smoking patterns, including the number of cigarette smokers and the number of people stopping and starting smoking, were analyzed in terms of gender and race by the National Health Interview Surveys from 1974 to 1985. Smoking is considered to be the most preventable cause of premature death in the United States. Great effort has been made by public health professionals to decrease cigarette smoking in the last 25 years. The number men smoking has decreased linearly each year to 33.5 percent in 1985. Smoking by women decreased to 27.6 percent during the same period. Fewer men started smoking during the period, while the number of women starting to smoke remained the same. However, more women than men stopped smoking during the period. Smoking by whites and blacks decreased to 29.6 and 35.6 percent, respectively. Overall, fewer blacks than whites started smoking between 1974 and 1985. The prevalence of smoking has decreased for men and women, both black and white, although more slowly in women. A reduction in the number of people starting smoking, rather than the amount of those quitting the habit, is mostly responsible for the convergence of smoking patterns of men and women.
Trends in the prevalence, initiation, and cessation of cigarette smoking are reported for the US population using weighted and age-standardized data from seven National Health Interview Surveys (1974 to 1985). The decline in prevalence was linear, with the prevalence for men decreasing at 0.91 percentage points per year to 33.5% in 1985 and the prevalence for women decreasing at 0.33 percentage points per year to 27.6% in 1985. For whites the rate of decline (percentage points per year) was 0.57, to 29.4% in 1985, and for blacks the decline was 0.67, to 35.6% in 1985. Smoking cessation increased among all gender-race groups from 1974 to 1985, with the yearly rate of increase (in percentage points per year) about equivalent for blacks (0.75 and whites (.77), while it was higher in women (0.90 than in men (0.67). Smoking initiation decreased among young men (-1.03), while it remained about the same in young women (+0.11). Initiation decreased at a more rapid rate in blacks (-1.02) than in whites (-0.35). We conclude that smoking prevalence is decreasing across all race-gender groups, although at a slower rate for women than men, and that differences in initiation, more than cessation, are primarily responsible for the converging of smoking prevalence rates among men and women.