June 17, Washington – Recent data is advising smokers to assume that their body is physically a decade older than it ought to be. According to a recent study delving into major health risks, a 55-year old man who smokes is at a higher risk level of dying within the next decade of his life as a 65-year old man who is a non-smoker. This was used as a stunning example of the proper context on some of America’s biggest death risks, as shown by a recently published series of charts.

However, risk is a tough concept to pin down objectively, due to how it mixes emotions and mathematics. Thus, people are often bombarded with a number of warnings of health dangers that have competing – and sometimes contradictory – assessments.

In the latest issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a research team went through numerous deaths statistics gathered by the government and updated charts comparing the odds of death in the coming decade. Comparisons were made between different age groups and taking numerous conditions into account. The team was lewd by Dr. Lisa Schawrtz, from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont.

The researchers developed the charts to stress the differences in death risks between age, gender, and smoking status. However, they chose not to include personal factors such as history of cancer – or other conditions – in the family.

The primary message of the charts is that risks are changing as people age. Accidents were found to be the single largest cause of fatalities in non-smoking men until the age of 45. The statistics show that accidents tie with heart disease until these men reach the age of 50, when heart ailments become the more prominent killer.

Smoking, based on the statistics, has an overwhelmingly negative effect on the chances of survival. In one example, a total of seven out of every 1,000 women were likely to die of breast cancer between the ages of 60 and 70. A total 14 out of 1,000 will die of heart disease within that period as well. However, the number of estimated fatalities increased to 31 for every 1,000 for heart disease and 41 out of every 1,000 for lung cancer.