Smoking death toll higher than estimated, study finds

The federal government has been underestimating the number of people who die from cigarette smoking by as many as 60,000 per year, new research has found.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that the government’s estimate that smoking kills about 480,000 Americans each year is about 60,000 short.

Over a 10-year span, researchers from the American Cancer Society also found that smokers’ death rates are three times higher than those of nonsmokers.

A central finding of the study is that the government does not count diseases like renal failure, hypertensive heart disease and respiratory diseases in its mortality estimates, though they made up about 17 percent of deaths among smokers.

“If smoking causes additional diseases, these official estimates may significantly underestimate the number of deaths attributable to smoking,” the researchers wrote.

They suggested that the government should review the diseases and consider formally adding them to the list of smoking-related deaths.