California's tobacco control program saved US$86 billion in 2004, while only costing the state US$1.8 billion to fund the program, a new study showed.

In a study published in the Aug. issue of PLoS Medicine, researchers evaluated the health care savings that occurred as a result of the tobacco control program between 1989, when the program began, and 2004, when the study ended.

The study showed that the program resulted in a 50-to-1 return on investment over 15 years, said researchers at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF).

The savings were due to the fact that the program prevented 3.6billion packs of cigarettes from being smoked over the 15-year period, according to the study.

"The benefits of the program accrued very quickly and are very large," senior author Stanton Glantz, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said.

Glantz said that the reason the California program had such sizable and rapid benefits in health-care cost savings was the fact it was directed at adults, not youth.

"When adults stop smoking, you see immediate benefits in heart disease, with impacts on cancer and lung diseases starting to appear a year or two later," he said.

These savings occurred despite the fact that there was a substantial diversion of funding during the mid-1990s. In fact, the researchers estimated, if the funding had been maintained at the same intensity as it had in the program's early years, the total health-care cost savings would have increased from US$86 billion to US$156 billion over the 15 years.

In the study, researchers used methods that were developed to analyze financial markets to model the relationship between per capita tobacco control expenditures, per capita cigarette consumption, and health-care expenditures across the study time frame. They compared the California results to those from 38 states that did not have comprehensive tobacco control programs before 2000.

A previous research has shown that large state tobacco control programs can reduce smoking, heart attacks and cancer. But this study is the first to quantify the health-care savings that result from these types of programs.

(Xinhua News Agency August 28, 2008)