Burden due to second-hand smoking exposure in children in Europe in the last decade: first results form the TackSHS project

Introduction Aim:To explore the last decade’s trend in mortality and morbidity attributable to second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure in children from the 28 European Countries within the Project “Tackling second-hand tobacco smoke and e-cigarette emissions: exposure assessment, novel interventions, impact on lung diseases and economic burden in diverse European populations” (TackSHS) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. Methods We identified the diseases causally linked with SHS exposure in children and we estimated the burden attributable to household SHS exposure using the comparative risk assessment methodology. We estimated the population attributable fractions (PAFs) selecting relative risks (RR) of mortality/disease from the most recent meta-analyses and estimating the prevalence of household SHS exposure from the Eurobarometer surveys (2006, 2010, 2012, 2014) in a multiple imputation framework. The burden due to SHS exposure was estimated applying the PAFs to the observed number of deaths extracted from the Eurostat website and to the disability adjusted life years (DALYs) estimated by summing the Global Burden of Disease estimates of years lived with disability and the Eurostat observed years of life lost. Results and Conclusion The diseases causally linked to SHS were low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome, lower respiratory infection, otitis media, and asthma. The trend in the PAFs and in the number of deaths and DALYs attributable to smoking and SHS exposure for the 28 European Countries will be presented. Funding This document was developed under the Project TackSHS that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 681040