From Smoking Boom, a Major Killer of Women
By DENISE GRADY
New York Times
For Jean Rommes, the crisis came five years ago, on a Monday morning when she had planned to go to work but wound up in the hospital, barely able to breathe. She was 59, the president of a small company in Iowa. Although she had quit smoking a decade earlier, 30 years of cigarettes had taken their toll.
After several days in the hospital, she was sent home tethered to an oxygen tank, with a raft of medicines and a warning: “If I didn’t do something, life was going to continue to be a pretty scary experience.”
Ms. Rommes has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., a progressive illness that permanently damages the lungs and is usually caused by smoking. Once thought of as an old man’s disease, this disorder has become a major killer in women as well, the consequence of a smoking boom in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. The death rate in women nearly tripled from 1980 to 2000, and since 2000, more women than men have died or been hospitalized every year because of the disease.
“Women started smoking in what I call the Virginia Slims era, when they started sponsoring sporting events,” said Dr. Barry J. Make, a lung specialist at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. “It’s now just catching up to them.”
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease actually comprises two illnesses: one, emphysema, destroys air sacs deep in the lungs; the other, chronic bronchitis, causes inflammation, congestion and scarring in the airways. The disease kills 120,000 Americans a year, is the fourth leading cause of death and is expected to be third by 2020. About 12 million Americans are known to have it, including many who have long since quit smoking, and studies suggest that 12 million more cases have not been diagnosed. Half the patients are under 65. The disease has left some 900,000 working-age people too sick to work and costs $42 billion a year in medical bills and lost productivity.
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New York Times
For Jean Rommes, the crisis came five years ago, on a Monday morning when she had planned to go to work but wound up in the hospital, barely able to breathe. She was 59, the president of a small company in Iowa. Although she had quit smoking a decade earlier, 30 years of cigarettes had taken their toll.
After several days in the hospital, she was sent home tethered to an oxygen tank, with a raft of medicines and a warning: “If I didn’t do something, life was going to continue to be a pretty scary experience.”
Ms. Rommes has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., a progressive illness that permanently damages the lungs and is usually caused by smoking. Once thought of as an old man’s disease, this disorder has become a major killer in women as well, the consequence of a smoking boom in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. The death rate in women nearly tripled from 1980 to 2000, and since 2000, more women than men have died or been hospitalized every year because of the disease.
“Women started smoking in what I call the Virginia Slims era, when they started sponsoring sporting events,” said Dr. Barry J. Make, a lung specialist at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. “It’s now just catching up to them.”
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease actually comprises two illnesses: one, emphysema, destroys air sacs deep in the lungs; the other, chronic bronchitis, causes inflammation, congestion and scarring in the airways. The disease kills 120,000 Americans a year, is the fourth leading cause of death and is expected to be third by 2020. About 12 million Americans are known to have it, including many who have long since quit smoking, and studies suggest that 12 million more cases have not been diagnosed. Half the patients are under 65. The disease has left some 900,000 working-age people too sick to work and costs $42 billion a year in medical bills and lost productivity.
(Continued here.)
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