Cigarette smoking in Kentucky: smoking-attributable mortality and years of potential life lost.

To measure the adverse impact of smoking in Kentucky, a major tobacco-growing state with the nation's highest prevalence of smokers ages 18 and over, percentages of deaths and years of potential life lost attributable to smoking were estimated. Summaries of the analyses for Kentucky in 1996 are presented. These show that 23% of all deaths in Kentucky were attributable to smoking, compared to 19.5% for the nation. Because most smoking-related illnesses develop over a long time, Kentucky can expect to continue to have a substantial excess of smoking-attributable deaths in the future.