Chapter 5: Actual and counterfactual smoking prevalence rates in the U.S. population via microsimulation.

The smoking history generator (SHG) developed by the National Cancer Institute simulates individual life/smoking histories that serve as inputs for the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) lung cancer models. In this chapter, we review the SHG inputs, describe its outputs, and outline the methodology behind it. As an example, we use the SHG to simulate individual life histories for individuals born between 1890 and 1984 for each of the CISNET smoking scenarios and use those simulated histories to compute the corresponding smoking prevalence over the period 1975-2000.