Will smoking kill you? Depends

A 55-year-old man who smokes is as likely to die in the next 10 years as a 65-year-old who has never smoked.

Fewer than 1 woman in 1,000 younger than 50 will die in the next decade from cervical cancer.

A 35-year-old nonsmoking man is five times as likely to die in an accident before 45 as he is to die of heart disease, and a 35-year-old woman is twice as likely to die accidentally by 45 as she is to die from breast cancer.

New risk charts in a paper published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute provide a broader perspective than most of the risk calculators, because they cover the risks for 10 different causes of death, and for all causes combined, while differentiating by age and among smokers, nonsmokers and former smokers.

Dr. Lisa Schwartz, a co-author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth, said statistics often have been used to frighten people about a particular disease. But a disease may present a large risk to some and very little to others. "These charts allow you to get stats that are about people who are more like you," she said.

Another advantage of the new charts, Schwartz said, is the 10-year time frame. "Often, numbers are presented as lifetime statistics, which make the risk look too large, or as one-year statistics, which make the risk look too small."