Smoking Cessation: Cigars — Coolish or Foolish?

Assessing Your Habit
Health Risks of Smoking
Tips to Help You Stop Smoking
Managing Nicotine Withdrawal Symptoms
Secondhand Smoke: Protect Yourself and Your Loved Ones
Snuffing Our Smokeless Tobacco Use
UPMC Patient Education Fact Sheets on Smoking

UPMC holds smoking cessation classes throughout the year. To find one near you, please visit www.upmc.com/Events.htm or call 800-533-UPMC (8762).

Movie stars and athletes smoke stogies on the cover of magazines. Bars and liquor stores sell fine cigars the way they do fine brandies. It's a symbol of the good life. But, considering the risks, smoking cigars is not much different than smoking cigarettes. The real difference is in the type of cancer that cigar smokers develop -- head and neck instead of lung.

Are Cigars "Safer" Than Cigarettes?
While there are only a few clinical studies specific to the effects and dangers of cigar smoking, the best studies estimate that smoking one cigar is equal to smoking two-and-a-half cigarettes.
The increase in cigar smoking in this decade especially among women and teenagers has been accompanied by the idea that cigars aren't as hazardous to your health as cigarettes. After all, the thinking goes, cigar smokers don't inhale. And that's why they get cancers in the mouth and neck, and not the lungs.

Who's Lighting Up?
Since 1993, consumption of large cigars and cigarillos has increased 45 percent to the highest level in almost a decade. Use of premium cigars, which can cost more than $10 each, is up an astounding 250 percent in that same period. This marks a reversal in a 20-year decline in cigar smoking from 1973 to 1993.

Most of the increase appears to be among teenagers and young adult males who smoke occasionally. And an amazing number of cigar smokers are children. According to one study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, about one of four teens say they have smoked cigars at least once. That number is four out of 10 in a study among Massachusetts' high school seniors.

Teenagers have seen an effective, if not always intentional, media campaign that has portrayed cigar smoking as hip and glamorous. If cigar smoking is ok for Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are about as cut and buff as Hollywood gets, then how bad can it be for the rest of us?

They're bad. Yet cigar packages don't carry the Surgeon General's health warning required on other tobacco products, and there have been few cigar studies that have been as thorough as those with cigarettes. No one, in fact, has apparently studied the effects of cigar smoking in women, because so few women have traditionally smoked cigars.

Still, researchers have established links between cigar smoking and a number of health risks:

• Most of the same carcinogens and cancer-producing chemicals found in cigarettes, like tars and nicotine, are found in cigars. That means cigar smokers increase their chances of heart disease and stroke.
  
  
• Overall cancer deaths among men who smoke cigars are one-third higher than among nonsmokers. There also seems to be a link between an increased chance of male breast cancer, otherwise decidedly rare, and cigar smoking.
  
  
• Studies indicate that all tobacco users are five to 10 times more likely to get cancer of the mouth or throat than their nonsmoking counterparts. Cigar smokers who drink, incidentally, may be at the high end of that range, since alcohol is extremely effective in dissolving the carcinogens into the blood stream.
  
  
• Cigar smokers have four to 10 times the risk of nonsmokers of dying from laryngeal, oral, or esophageal cancers. Because of the way cigars are puffed, more carcinogens sit in the mouth, increasing oral cancer risk.

And then there is the risk posed by secondhand smoke to those around cigar smokers. Researchers found that the concentrations of carbon monoxide at two cigar social events in San Francisco were higher than the levels found on a busy California freeway. Had these indoor exposures lasted eight hours, they would have exceeded the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for outdoor air established by the Environmental Protection Agency.