ARTICLES Doses of Nicotine and Lung Carcinogens Delivered to Cigarette Smokers

Background: Cigarette smoke yields of tar and nicotine ob-tained under the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)-specified machine-smoking protocol (35-mL puff volume drawn for 2 seconds once per minute) may not accurately reflect the de-livery of toxins and carcinogens to the smoker. We con-ducted this study to obtain more realistic estimates of expo-sure to components of cigarette smoke that affect lung cancer risk. Methods: We used a pressure transducer system to evaluate puffing characteristics for 133 smokers of ciga-rettes rated by the FTC at 1.2 mg of nicotine or less (56 smokers of low-yield cigarettes [<0.8 mg of nicotine per cigarette] and 77 smokers of medium-yield cigarettes [0.9– 1.2 mg of nicotine per cigarette]). We programmed measure-ments from a randomly chosen subset of 72 of these smokers into a piston-type machine to generate smoke from eac