Estimation of smoking index for male smokers in Multan city

Abstract

Smoking index measures the present burden of smoking in terms of cigarette-years or pack-years smoked. The present article is about estimation of smoking index for male smokers in Multan city. We used Indrayan's smoking index that accounts for different characteristics like cigarettes smoked per day, duration of smoking, passive smoking, smoking of filter cigarettes, age at start and duration elapsed since quitting by ex-smokers etc. It is estimated that the average smoking index is 10.48±0.34 while the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles are 5.81, 9.51 and 13.66, respectively. Furthermore, the Weibull distribution is found to be the best fitted empirical distribution for the obtained dataset of smoking index with estimates of shape parameter and scale parameter as 1.6407 and 11.7049, respectively. © Asian Network for Scientific Information, 2011.