Everyone knows smoking cigarettes is dangerous, but smokers and non-smokers have significant misperceptions about the magnitude of the risk associated with lighting up, researchers found.
Jon Krosnick, PhD, of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and colleagues found that people tend to overestimate the absolute risk and underestimate the relative risk associated with tobacco use.
They suggested that framing public health messages about cigarette use in terms of a smoker's relative risk for lung cancer, COPD, cardiovascular disease, and other health harms may have a bigger impact on behavior than more commonly used methods of educating the public about smoking's dangers.
According to the CDC, cigarette smokers are to develop lung cancer or die from lung cancer than non-smokers.
"Researchers who study risk look at the (relative risk) ratio all the time. They never look at the percentage point difference," Krosnick told app. "But this way of thinking about risk is often absent from public health discussions about smoking."
In their study, published in the journal Krosnick and colleagues analyzed data from national surveys that assessed perceived smoking risk for lung cancer among current smokers, former smokers, and non-smokers. They compared three risk perception measures (absolute, attributable, and relative risk) in terms of their associations with smoking cessation and the desire to quit.
"Perceptions of relative risk were associated, as expected, with smoking onset and smoking cessation, whereas perceptions of absolute risk and attributable risk were not," the researchers wrote. "Additionally, the relation of relative risk with smoking status was stronger among people who held their risk perceptions with more certainty."
Krosnick and colleagues found that current smokers, former smokers, and never-smokers all tended to underestimate the relative risk of smoking.
They concluded that the findings should encourage "consideration of a different approach to communicating health risks," adding that quantifying relative risk in public health messages could have a measurable effect on smoking cessation and smoking avoidance rates.
Krosnick noted that cigarette packaging labels in the United States include warnings from the Surgeon General that focus on specific health problems associated with tobacco use, but they do not provide information to help consumers quantify the risk.
"This may be why quantitative information about relative risk on cigarette packages in Australia (e.g., 'Tobacco smoking causes more than four times the number of deaths caused by car accidents') appears to have been effective in encouraging smoking cessation," the researchers wrote.
"We all need to be better informed about the relative risk of smoking with regard to lung cancer, heart disease, COPD and all of the related health consequences," Krosnick said.
Disclosures
Funding for this research was provided by LinChiat Chang Consulting and GfK Custom Research North America.
Primary Source
PLOS One
Krosnick JA, et al "Perceptions of health risks of cigarette smoking: a new measure reveals widespread misunderstanding" PLOS One 2017; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182063.