Tobacco relative risks

Relative risks for current vs. never cigarette smokers.

RRtob(
  data,
  disease = "Pharynx",
  smoker_status_var = "smk.state",
  sex_var = "sex",
  age_var = "age",
  rr_data = tobalcepi::tobacco_relative_risks
)

Arguments

data

Data table of individual characteristics.

disease

Character - the name of the disease for which the relative risks will be computed.

smoker_status_var

Character - the name of the variable containing whether an individual is a current, former or never smoker.

sex_var

Character - the name of the variable containing individual sex.

age_var

Character - the name of the variable containing individual age in single years.

rr_data

Data table containing the relative risks of current vs. never smokers. The data table "tobacco_relative_risks" is embedded within the stapmr package.

Value

Returns a numeric vector of each individual's relative risks for the tobacco-related disease specified by "disease".

Details

We focus on the risks of current smoking and limit ourselves to diseases that affect the consumer themselves e.g. excluding secondary effects of smoking on children. We assume the equivalence of relative risks and odds ratios. Our starting point was the Royal College of Physician's (RCP) report "Hiding in plain sight: Treating tobacco dependency in the NHS", which reviewed smoking-disease associations to produce an updated list of diseases that are caused by smoking and updated risk sources. We mainly keep to the RCP report's disease list and risk functions, with any deviations from the RCP list and risk sources being for one of two reasons:

• There are often slightly conflicting ICD-10 code definitions used for some diseases and we have sought to harmonise these consistently across both tobacco and alcohol, based on the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model (SAPM) v4.0 disease list;

• Since publication of the RCP report, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) produced their own disease list and risk sources for cancers attributable to modifiable risk factors, including tobacco and alcohol. Discussions with CRUK shaped the disease definitions in our updated Sheffield disease list for alcohol. Where there are differences in the risk sources used in the RCP report and CRUK's work, we take the estimate that matches most closely to our disease definitions, or the more recent estimate.

Examples

if (FALSE) {
# Example data

n <- 1e2

data <- data.table(
  smk.state = sample(x = c("current", "former", "never"), size = n, replace = T),
  sex = "Female",
  age = 30
)

# Apply the function
test <- RRtob(
  data,
  disease = "Pharynx"
)
}