Among the participants who had never smoked, the age-standardized rate of death from lung cancer remained constant for men (Table 3) but increased slightly for women (Table 2) from the 1959–1965 period (CPS I) to the 1982–1988 period (CPS II), before decreasing in the contemporary period. Among female smokers, there was a large increase (by a factor of 16.8) in deaths from lung cancer over the entire 50-year period, about half of which occurred during the past 20 years (Table 2). In the CPS I cohort, lung-cancer mortality among male smokers was about 12 times as high as that among men who had never smoked; the mortality approximately doubled from the 1959–1965 period to the 1982–1988 period (Table 3) before stabilizing in the period after the 1980s. Only the two oldest age groups of male smokers had any increase in the rate of death from lung cancer from the 1982–1988 period to the contemporary period (Fig. 1); these age groups represent birth cohorts from 1900 to 1929 (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix). Absolute lung-cancer mortality was higher for men
