Mentholated cigarettes account for roughly 30 percent of cigarettes sold in the United States, and they are favored by African-American smokers by roughly a threefold margin compared to white smokers.
In spite of dramatic differences in the rates of the four cancers by race and sex, as well as dramatic changes over the 35-year time period, there was little evidence of a correlation between prevalence of mentholated cigarette use and cancer rates.
Because our ecologic observation from 24 years ago initially drew attention to menthol, we decided to examine ecologically the changes in the rates of four smoking-related cancers by race and sex from 1973 to 2007 in relation to the prevalence of smoking of mentholated cigarettes.