The decline in cancer mortality is about much more than smoking

Saloni Dattani · 24 Apr 2025 · scientificdiscovery.dev ↗

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
The fall in cancer mortality is not mostly the fall in smoking: stomach and colorectal cancer were already declining before smoking was.

Their wordsIn my view, without smoking, we probably would have seen cancer mortality decline much earlier.

Interesting
Our reading
The causes of an outcome cannot be divided into slices that add up to 100 per cent, so a large effect from one cause does not leave a small remainder for the others.

Their wordsFinally, I’ll explain a deeper issue with the whole idea: we can’t neatly divide the causes of an outcome into slices that add up to 100%.

Interesting