Long term tobacco smoking increases the risk for mortality but not the rate of aging

A substantial number of epidemiological studies have discussed changes in mortality risk by life history exposures, and yet few have investigated the rate of aging. The rate of aging has been widely accepted as age-related mortality and the decline in physiological function. Hence, it has been assumed that smokers experience not only a higher mortality risk but also a higher rate of aging than never smokers. In this study, we address whether this assumption can be casually accepted by investigating the rate of aging in current and never smokers. Here, using a frailty-based Gompertz survival framework, we illustrate the force of mortality by smoking status and the rate of aging as the relative derivative in mortality with respect to increasing age. As expected, smokers experience a higher risk for mortality than never smokers. Interestingly, their relative risk converged with increasing age, a phenomenon due to unobserved heterogeneity. In this article, we report for the first time that long-term tobacco smokers do not experience a higher rate of aging than non-smokers, and that smokers do experience a 5-year decrement in life expectancy.