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People with hepatitis C in the United States are at least three times more likely to smoke than the general population but little is being done to help them stop smoking, and US researchers say it is folly to spend huge sums on hepatitis C treatment without trying to help patients stop smoking.
The researchers’ findings are published in the American Journal of Medicine.
Smoking contributes to three of the five leading causes of death in the United States: heart disease, stroke and cancer. Hepatitis C independently increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, liver cancer and cancers of the head, neck, lung, pancreas, kidney and anorectum. “There is some evidence that these risks may be additive,” say the authors, noting that smoking increases the risk of developing liver cancer in people with hepatitis C.
“There is a cigarette smoking epidemic embedded within the hepatitis C epidemic in the US,” the authors write. “Public health authorities together with hepatitis C care providers will need to make a concerted effort to combat tobacco use in this group.”
“It is public health folly to spend tens of billions of dollars annually on antiviral hepatitis C medications and ignore the lethal addiction affecting more than 60% of them.”