Each year approximately 443,000 premature deaths can be attributed to smoking. Cigarette smoking is identified as a cause of various cancers, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory conditions, as well as low birthweight and other adverse health outcomes.

Measuring the prevalence of tobacco use in the population can alert communities to potential adverse health outcomes and can be valuable for assessing the need for cessation programs or the effectiveness of existing programs.

Description: Adult smoking prevalence is the estimated % of adults (over 18 years) that currently smoke every day or "most days" and have smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime. Seven year aggregate data is used. Data shown on the graph indicate the last year of the seven year period.

Target Value is based on the Top US Performers (90th percentile) and changes for each time period.

Source: Annual County Health Rankings data are released in March each year and available at http://www.countyhealthrankings.org . Updated 2016

Note: Prior to the 2016 County Health Rankings, up to seven survey years of landline only BRFSS data were aggregated to produce county estimates. However, even with multiple years of data, these did not provide reliable estimates for all counties, particularly those with smaller respondent samples. For the 2016 County Health Rankings, the CDC produced 2014 county estimates using single-year 2014 BRFSS data and a multilevel modeling approach based on respondent answers and their age, sex and race/ethnicity, combined with county-level poverty and county and state level contextual effects. See more at http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/north-caro...