Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #118239

Hai-Yen Sung, PhD¹, Liping Wang, MM², Shuigao Jin, PhD², and Teh-wei Hu, PhD³. (1) Institute for Health & Aging, University of California at San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 340, San Francisco, CA 94118, 415-502-4697, Hai-Yen.Sung@ucsf.edu, (2) Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 Nan Wei Road, Beijing, China, (3) School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley, 412 Warren Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-7360

The objective of this study was to assess the direct and indirect costs attributable to smoking in China in 2000. Three types of medical care services were considered: hospitalizations, ambulatory care visits, and self-medications. Indirect costs were defined as the value of lives lost due to smoking-attributable premature deaths and the value of time lost from work due to smoking-related illness. Epidemiological mortality ratio approach was used to estimate the smoking-attributable fraction (SAF) for each type of medical care services and indirect costs. Smoking-related diseases included cancer, diseases of the circulatory system, and diseases of the respiratory system. The SAFs were applied to health care expenditures, workloss days, and deaths to obtain smoking-attributable total measures. In 2000, the direct costs of smoking in China amounted to 11 billion Chinese Yuan, including 9 billion Yuan for urban smokers and 2 billion for rural smokers. About 66% of total direct costs were due to excess use of ambulatory care visits and 31% were due to excess utilization in hospitalizations. Indirect costs amounted to 20 billion Yuan. The smoking-related medical care costs in China in 2000 was underestimated in this study. But if the current trends of smoking behavior continue, however, China will bear a much heavier economic burden from cigarette smoking in the future.

Learning Objectives:

• · At the conclusion of the presentation, participants in this session will be able to understand how to measure the effect of smoking on illness, premature mortality, and productivity losses in economic terms.
• · The estimated results will provide policy makers and tobacco control advocates the evidence of health burden that smoking in China, a country which has the largest number of smokes in the world.

Keywords: Smoking, Tobacco Control

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.