Study: Disabled among heaviest smokers

ATLANTA (AP) — Americans with disabilities smoke more than everyone else, according to the first national study to compare smoking rates between the two groups.

About one in four disabled people are smokers, compared to about one in five among the nondisabled, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Wednesday.

More people with disabilities also said they’d seen a doctor or nurse recently, and had been advised to quit cig arettes, the CDC study found.

Having such national data is helpful, but the results aren’t surprising, said Kenneth Warner, a leading tobacco researcher who is dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

The disabled population included people with mental illness and drug and alcohol addictions — groups known to have higher smoking rates. “It is very believable,” Warner said, of the CDC study’s findings.

More than 10 million Americans with disabilities smoke, according to the study authors.

They said many disabled people are smokers partly because a disproportionate percentage of them are low-income, and poor people have higher smoking rates.

However, the study found that among people with lower incomes, disabled people smoked at a higher rate (37 percent) than nondisabled poor people (23 percent).