Updated attributable risk for smoking due to movies: 37%

Jim Sargent and colleagues recently published a new study providing a long-term followup of an earlier study (published in 2005) that yielded an attributable risk for smoking initiation due to the movies of 26%.  Adding in this 2012 Sargent study to the four earlier studies that we used to estimate that the attributable risk for smoking initiation due to the movies was 44% lowers the pooled estimate to 37% with a 95% confidence interval extending from 25% to 52%.  (Our earlier estimate, published in Thorax, was 44% with a confidence interval from 34% to 58%.) 

From a statistical point of view, these two estimates are indistinguishable, but the 37% value is the more reliable one since it is based on more information than  the earlier estimate.

More details are available here.