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A Health Belief Model

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A Health Belief Model

Intervention for smoking cessation in the Chinese capital Beijing

Tobacco use may be defined as any habitual use of the tobacco plant leaf and its products. The predominant use of tobacco is by smoke inhalation of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars. Smokeless tobacco refers to a variety of tobacco products that are either sniffed, sucked, or chewed. A tobacco user is one who uses tobacco products four or more times per week in the past six months. If you are unsure whether you fit the definition, reflect on your tobacco usage during the past week. If you used tobacco four times this week, and if you’ve kept this habit for more than six months, then the insurance companies will label you a tobacco user. …show more content…

When the first intimations of the role of tobacco smoking in increased rates of lung cancer were being investigated in the 1940s and early 1950s, many scientists were hostile to investigating smoking. Many of the scientists were smokers themselves. Tobacco was a money-maker for investors, it created jobs, and government taxes could be levied without disrupting sales. Sir Richard Doll noted that when he and Bradford Hill were developing their well-known early study on the increasing number of lung cancer cases, they hesitated before adding smoking to the list of factors being investigated.
Tobacco use causes approximately 440 000 deaths annually, which is twice the number of deaths attributed to alcohol, homicide, illicit drug use, and suicide combined.
The study of the effects of tobacco use helped to create the rules of chronic disease epidemiology and many cancers and other disease categories have been causally linked to tobacco use. major chronic degenerative diseases are caused by smoking, including many cardiovascular, cerebrovascular and chronic respiratory diseases and cancers. - Exposure in utero to maternal tobacco use, or after birth to maternal or paternal tobacco smoke, is causally related to stillbirth, low-birth weight, congenital defects, childhood asthma and other respiratory illness.
The facts - mortality and …show more content…

Smoking or exposure to others’ tobacco smoke not only threatens the attainment of non-smoker life expectancy, but also severely diminishes the attainment of a healthy life span. Recent data from the US Health and Retirement Study found that heavily smoking males aged 50–54 loses on average about 2 years of healthy living plus about 2 years of life span; for heavily smoking women the figures are 1.66 years of lost health and 1.44 years earlier death than non-smokers. Many non-fatal diseases caused or exacerbated by tobacco reduce quality of life, such as blindness from age-related macular degeneration or cataracts, Crohn’s disease and duodenal ulcers, hip fracture, periodontitis and ectopic pregnancy.
Tobacco use is now being implicated in the reduced efficacy of certain medical treatments or in lower or longer post-surgical recovery rates. Not all cases of the above tobacco diseases are caused solely by tobacco. These diseases are multifactorial, and exposures to more than one factor multiply risks. For lung cancer or chronic respiratory diseases, about 15% of cases are not related at all to

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