Who smokes? A demographic analysis of Wisconsin smokers

Abstract

Context: Despite the general decline in prevalence of smoking and actual consumption of cigarettes, there is a heightened concern that this decline has not been uniform throughout the population and that specific subpopulations are adversely affected by tobacco use.

Objective: To estimate smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption among Wisconsin subpopulations by demographic identifiers, gender, race, age, educational attainment, and income.

Design, setting and participants: We estimated tobacco use among primary sub-populations in Wisconsin in 2003 from the Wisconsin Tobacco Survey. Approximately 8000 interviews were completed via a telephone survey.

Main outcome measure: Smoking prevalence and tobacco consumption among sub-populations and related policy recommendations.

Results: Approximately 20% of the Wisconsin adult population smokes cigarettes. However, the prevalence of smoking is not the same among all population groups. There are also substantial group differences in how many cigarettes people smoke per day. The number of cigarettes smoked is closely tied to the risk of smoking-related illness. The greatest disparities are associated with income and education. People with incomes between 10,000-15,000 dollars per year are more than twice as likely to smoke