Background:
Smoking is a single, well-identified cause of many lethal diseases. This is one of the few determinants of cancer and other lifethreatening diseases that can be completely eliminated. Many diseases and deaths can be avoided by changing people’s attitudes and behavior towards smoking.

Objective:
The main purpose of this study is to present changes in health consequences of smoking in Poland between 2005 and 2020.

Methods:
Poland’s population data, mortality data, and smoking frequencies come from Statistics Poland. The relative risk of death (compared to non-smokers) for each of these diseases is based on the prospective Cancer Prevention Study II (CPS-II) results, conducted by the American Cancer Society in the 1980s on a sample of 1.2 million Americans. The magnitude of excess deaths has been estimated for the major disease groups, such as malignant neoplasms, respiratory tract diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and digestive tract diseases.

Results:
Between 2005 and 2020 the proportion of smokers in males dropped by 7 percentage points (from 31% to 24%), while in females it remained stable (20%). The number of excess deaths, especially among men, has decreased (males 54000 vs 32000; females 20000 vs 18000). The excess deaths fraction from cancer in men decreased from 73% to 37%. There was an increase in this fraction among women from 14% in 2005 to 18% in 2020. Among the other causes of death in both genders there was a reduction in the fraction of excess deaths related to smoking.

Conclusions:
The obtained results indicate that cutting down on smoking prevalence translates directly into a considerable reduction of the excess deaths related to smoking-dependent diseases.