Norwegian insurer to raise premiums for smokers

A Norwegian life insurer has decided to follow the lead of many other western providers and will begin to charge smokers extra for life insurance.

British life insurers already routinely take into account a persons smoking habits when working out the total cost of the premium and smokers can often expect to to pay almost 40% more over the lifetime of their policy.

This recent move by Storebrand Insurance will see people who smoke as little as one cigarette daily having their premiums raised by up to 50%. The insurer pointed out that it would not only reflect the true risk of insuring smokers but would provide a stimulus to kick the habit. As Jan Otto Risebrobakken. Explains:

“People know that it is dangerous to smoke. This is by now well documented, and we therefore feel it is right to differentiate. It is also an extra incentive for smokers to quit”.

Source: onlyfinance.com, 15 October 2008
Link:  http://tiny.cc/EXtBC

Voucher plan for pregnant smokers

Pregnant women who smoke may be offered vouchers to encourage them to give up under proposals by an NHS trust. Telford and Wrekin Primary Care Trust said plans would include women being tested to ensure they had given up. Dr Kevin Lewis, from the trust, said studies had shown people needed motivation to help them give up smoking. He said simply highlighting the dangers of smoking in pregnancy was not always enough to make people give up.

The move was "approved in principle" at a trust board meeting on Tuesday, but members asked for more information about how it would work, a spokesman for the trust said. Dr Lewis said: "One of these motivators can be in the form of rewards. It might be something like a £5 gift voucher - and they receive these if they maintain quitting from smoking and that would be tested to make sure that they have."

He said tests included carbon monoxide monitoring, such as a breath test which showed if someone had recently smoked. Urine and saliva tests were also among those carried out. "You would think, that after all the knowledge there is out there now about the health risks from smoking - not only to yourself but also to the unborn child - that that would be enough to motivate people. But we are dealing with an addiction and we are dealing with human behaviour and we just know from the studies that people are often not as motivated by the benefits to future health as they are by the here and now."

A trust spokesman said the idea was put forward because similar schemes had proved successful elsewhere in the UK. He said research by the trust also suggested it could work and in one focus group of pregnant smokers, 13 out of 15 women suggested vouchers would be a good incentive to give up. 

Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) welcomed the plan. Martin Dockrell, policy manager with the anti-smoking group, said: "It's a very interesting project working with a group who are finding it particularly difficult to quit smoking." He said to get these mothers-to-be at a "critical time" could have huge benefits. It could improve the health of the mother and dramatically improve the health of the baby and also produce big savings for the NHS." He said the scheme would need to be evaluated to chart its success.

More details about the proposal will be presented at a trust board meeting later this year.

Source: BBC News, 16 October 2008
Link: http://tiny.cc/aVBl0

Smoking kills 227 every day

Tobacco killed 227 people a day in England in 2007 – equivalent to a jet airliner crashing every 24 hours – and caused 1,200 hospital admissions, despite the huge fall in smoking in recent decades, latest figures show. Figures from the NHS Information Centre show there were 445,100 hospital admissions for smoking among the over-35s, one in 20 of the total, over the year. A quarter of the patients had cancer, with the remainder divided between heart and respiratory conditions.

Deaths caused by smoking in the same age group totalled 82,900 in the year. Almost 45 per cent were due to cancer, with most of the remainder heart and respiratory disease. Smoking is believed to cost the NHS in England £2.7bn a year. The one positive note in the figures is that deaths from smoking are declining, as more people give up, or never start. Deaths are down 14 per cent since 2001, equivalent to saving more than 37 lives a day.

But quitting rates have fallen sharply since last year, the first year of the smoking ban in public places. Less than 135,000 people set a quit date through the NHS Stop Smoking service in the second quarter of 2008, down by 22 per cent since the same period in 2007. Of those, less than half succeeded in staying cigarette-free for four weeks. Despite the high failure rate, the £16m cost of running the Stop Smoking service is considered highly cost-effective.

Smoking has been declining for 50 years. In 2006, 22 per cent of adults smoked, according to the General Household Survey, down from 39 per cent in 1980 and from 80 per cent (among men) in the 1950s. After decades of being dominated by men, smoking is becoming feminised among the young. Though the proportion of children aged from 11 to 15 who smoke has declined, the decline has been more marked in boys than girls. Today, girls are more likely to smoke regularly (8 per cent compared with 5 per cent). 

Successive governments have banned advertising, imposed warnings on cigarette packets, outlawed their sale to under-18s, offered help with quitting on the NHS and made it illegal to smoke in pubs, clubs, restaurants or any enclosed public space. Professor Martin Jarvis, a trustee of the anti-smoking charity Ash, says the present government's record in slashing smoking rates is one of its "finest achievements".

Source: The Independent, 17 October 2008
Link:  http://tiny.cc/0J7ZB

Gene variations, secondhand smoke linked to early asthma

Certain genetic variations previously identified as putting people at higher risk for asthma apparently only increase the risk of so-called early-onset asthma, which is disease that appears at 4 years of age or younger. The risk is further increased by exposure to secondhand smoke, again early in life, according to a study in the Oct. 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"This helps support the theory that asthma is not a uniform disease. It's probably several problems that end up with the same type of symptoms," said Dr. Thomas Leath, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine. "It also supports the fact that it's not just genes that cause asthma, and it's not just the environment, but the interaction between the two."

Another striking point in the study was the clear cut-off point of 4 years of age, experts said. "It seems clear that there are certain genetic loci that are connected with early onset asthma -- that wasn't surprising," said Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "What was interesting was the interlude between nature and nurture. It's clear that those kids exposed to secondhand smoke had much more of a flowering of the disease process than those who weren't. That illustrates that while something can be genetically determined, it can be amplified by environmental factors. Even so, the study results won't have any immediate clinical implications, said Leath, adding, "It's a great step in the right direction, but we don't know what to do with it."

Asthma is increasingly recognized as a number of separate diseases, rather than one, overarching disease. Not much is known about the causes of different forms of the respiratory condition, and understanding the causes could help unravel the biological mechanisms behind the disease processes. The age at which asthma begins is one way to differentiate different types -- or "phenotypes" -- of the disease.  A previous, genome-wide association study found that genetic variations at chromosome 17q21 were linked to a heightened risk of asthma. But it wasn't known if these variations (also known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) had a connection with the age at which asthma developed. 

For the new study, French researchers tested 36 SNPs in the 17q21 region among 1,511 people from 372 families. Eleven SNPs were "significantly associated" with asthma, and three of those were "strongly associated" with the disease. Four SNPs were strongly associated with early onset asthma but had no relationship with late-onset disease. There was an even stronger association between six variants and asthma in people who had been exposed to secondhand smoke at an early age -- an almost threefold increase in risk in children with the genetic variant and early exposure to smoke.

The study's lead author, Dr. Florence Demenais, noted, "Our findings can provide a greater understanding of the role of the 17q21 genetic variants in the pathophysiology of asthma. Indeed, we found that their effect is restricted to early-onset asthma (occurring at 4 years of age or younger)." Demenais, director of research at INSERM (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) in Paris, added, "The risk of early-onset asthma conferred by these variants is enhanced when the subjects have been exposed to environmental tobacco smoke in early life. These variants regulate the expression of at least two genes, ORMDL3 and GSDML (also called GSDMB)."

Source: healthfinder.gov, 15 October 2008
Link: http://tiny.cc/rsKI5