The Changing Faces of Smoking: Sociodemographic Trends in Cigarette Use in the U.S., 1992–2019

Cigarette smoking remains a significant public health problem that causes many deaths worldwide. We used the Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Study data to analyze how smoking behavior changed among different U.S. subpopulations from 1992 to 2019. We employed joinpoint regression analysis, the Cochran-Armitage test, and the Jonckheere-Terpstra test to detect changes in smoking trends and daily cigarette consumption. We found that the overall smoking prevalence declined from 24.46 to 11.46%, with the largest decline in the 18–24 age group. However, we also found persistent disparities in smoking rates by gender, urbanization, and ethnicity. Separated individuals and those with lower education had higher smoking rates than others throughout the study period. Unemployed people also had very high smoking prevalences consistently. Daily cigarette consumption decreased over the study period as well. Our study shows that while there has been progress in reducing cigarette use, there are still significant gaps among some sociodemographic groups that need more attention and intervention.