Smoking

Here’s some ONS data on differences between smoking rates in more and less deprived areas. They combined a 2012 household survey with IMD2010 to get a picture of how rates vary by deprivation:

A clear correlation with deprivation appears, with both men and women in the most deprived 20% being over twice as likely to smoke as those in the least deprived 20%. The ONS also found that men and women in the least deprived quintile were more likely to have quit smoking than those in the most deprived quintile – 74% and 76% respectively compared with 46.% and 48.5%.

The consequences of this inequality is a far higher smoking-related death rate in deprived areas. If we use Public Health England’s excellent Local Tobacco Control Profiles tool we find that deprivation is, perhaps unsurprisingly, strongly linked to deaths from both lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as well as smoking attributable mortality generally.

Click for larger size.

Source here (go to ‘compare indicators’).