In 2018, 8.6% of the total disease burden in Australia was due to tobacco use, making it the leading risk factor that contributed to disease burden and deaths.
These estimates reflect the amount of disease burden that could have been avoided if all people in Australia had not used tobacco or been exposed to second hand smoke in their lifetime.
Tobacco use was causally linked to the burden of 41 individual diseases including: 19 types of cancer; 7 cardiovascular diseases; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); and asthma (see ABDS 2018 Risk factor estimates data table).
How much burden was attributable to tobacco use?
Tobacco use was responsible for over 76% of the total disease burden due to lung cancer, 73% of the burden due to COPD and over 50% of the burden from oesophageal cancer.
Tobacco use contributed the most to fatal burden, with almost 20,500 deaths (13% of all deaths) in 2018.
Note that the following visualisation displays the top 10 linked diseases due to tobacco use by the selected measure.