The contribution of smoking to regional mortality differences in the Netherlands

We quantify the effect of smoking on Dutch all-cause mortality differences between 40 NUTS-3 regions by mapping, correlating, and decomposing regional variance in age-standardised all-cause mortality, smoking-attributable mortality, smoking- and non-smoking-related mortality. Smoking and consequently smoking-related mortality clearly contribute to the significant regional differences in all-cause mortality, especially among males. Smoking-attributable mortality, which ranged from 22 to 30% among males and 7 to 14% among females, correlated significantly with all-cause mortality, especially for males. Excluding smoking-related mortality the variance declined. The variance in smoking-related mortality contributed 39% of the variance in all-cause mortality among males and 30 % among females.