Fig. 1

Overview of study design

The burden of disease in the total population was extracted from specific data sources. Smoking related diseases were based on literature (1). The relative risks of these diseases were extracted from the General Surgeon Report 2014 (2) and combined with the prevalence of current, former and never smokers acquired from the latest Swiss Health Survey (3) for the calculation of the smoking attributable fractions (SAFs) (4). In the last step, SAFs were multiplied with mortality, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), medical costs and productivity losses in the total population (5) to get to the burden attributable to smoking (6).