Description

Tobacco use is one of the major public health concerns and it is the most preventable cause of
morbidity and mortality worldwide. It is estimated that 16 million adults are currently living
with a smoking-related disease in the United States (Adams, 2020). Cigarette smoking is the
main source of tobacco consumption and it is also the most dangerous one. Every year, more
than 700,000 people die because of smoke-related diseases in Europe. More than one-quarter
of Europeans smoke and one-third of smokers are 25–39 years of age (Ward et al., 2016).
There are nearly 12 million smokers in Italy, mostly men, although female smokers increased
by over a million in 2016 (Volpe et al., 2018).
It is known that smokers’ life expectancy is on average 10 years shorter than non-smokers’.
Moreover, half of the smokers lose about 20 years of healthy life before dying because of a
smoke-related disease. Besides being involved in the pathophysiology of several types of
malignant neoplasms, not only in the lungs, smoking represents the first cause of chronic
respiratory diseases, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (Mokdad et al.,
2018),