WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- About one in five U.S. adults used some form of tobacco product in 2015, a government report suggested Thursday.
About 42 million U.S. adults -- more than 87 percent of the nation's nearly 49 million tobacco product users -- reported using a combustible product such as cigarettes, cigars, or pipes, said the study in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
The remaining adult tobacco users reported using e-cigarettes or smokeless tobacco products such as chewing tobacco, snuff, dip, snus, and dissolvable tobacco.
"Too many Americans are harmed by cigarette smoking, which is the nation's leading preventable cause of death and disease," Brenda Fitzgerald, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in a statement.
Data from the 2015 National Health Interview Survey also found that 9.5 million American adults reported "every day" or "some day" use of two or more tobacco products.
Among all adults, cigarettes were the most commonly used product (15.1 percent); followed by e-cigarettes (3.5 percent); cigars, cigarillos, or filtered little cigars (3.4 percent); smokeless tobacco (2.3 percent); and pipes, water pipes, or hookahs (1.2 percent).
And use of any tobacco product use was more common among males (25.2 percent) than among females (15.4 percent) and more common among adults aged 25 to 44 years (23.3 percent) than among those aged 65 years and older (11.1 percent).
Smoking kills an estimated 480,000 Americans each year, and about 16 million Americans suffer from a smoking-related illness, according to the CDC.
