Health Care Utilization and Expenditures Attributable to Cigar Smoking Among US Adults, 2000-2015

Cigar use in the United States is a growing public health concern because of its increasing popularity. We estimated health care utilization and expenditures attributable to cigar smoking among US adults aged ≥35.

We analyzed data on 84 178 adults using the 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015 National Health Interview Surveys. We estimated zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression models on hospital nights, emergency department (ED) visits, physician visits, and home-care visits as a function of tobacco use status-current sole cigar smokers (ie, smoke cigars only), current poly cigar smokers (smoke cigars and smoke cigarettes or use smokeless tobacco), former sole cigar smokers (used to smoke cigars only), former poly cigar smokers (used to smoke cigars and smoke cigarettes or use smokeless tobacco), other tobacco users (ever smoked cigarettes and used smokeless tobacco but not cigars), and never tobacco users (never smoked cigars, smoked cigarettes, or used smokeless tobacco)-and other covariates. We calculated health care utilization attributable to current and former sole cigar smoking based on the estimated ZIP models, and then we calculated total health care expenditures attributable to cigar smoking.

Current and former sole cigar smoking was associated with excess annual utilization of 72 137 hospital nights, 32 748 ED visits, and 420 118 home-care visits. Annual health care expenditures attributable to sole cigar smoking were $284 million ($625 per sole cigar smoker), and total annual health care expenditures attributable to sole and poly cigar smoking were $1.75 billion.

Comprehensive tobacco control policies and interventions are needed to reduce cigar smoking and the associated health care burden.