As a former ICU nurse I can tell you that someone who has been taking good care of their body, is fit and healthy, has a better chance of survival and less complications while recovering as someone who didn’t. No matter the injury.

If you get hit by a bus and your lung is compromised it has a harder time compensating for the injury if it was already damaged.

So yes. You might have a better chance to survive a car crash if you haven’t been smoking.

You should ABSOLUTELY quit smoking. Also, you should stop getting hit by buses. Neither one are good for you.

Lights Cigarette

Immediately assassinated by Truck-Kun

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I’m going to echo korimee, and add that it’s statistics.

When you’re tallying causes of death, like cancer, heart disease, stroke, organ failure, pathogens, whatever; if you factor in whether or not people smoke, smokers die younger from those things, and are a higher percentage of deaths like that as opposed to old age.

Non smokers get those things later, statistically, and have better chances of not only surviving, but recovering. Take stroke as an example. On average, the chances of severe disability from a stroke goes up the more risk factors you have. Smokers are less likely to survive a stroke, and if they do, have worse outcomes when they’re stabilized. Then they have less resilience during the recovery process, leading to worse disability statistically.

The final question you asked only applies obliquely, and others have covered that it would only apply in limited cases. Accidental death, the uptick for smokers is essentially meaningless. For the specific “hit by a bus” kind of accidental death, distraction is how it usually happens anyway, but smokers trying to light up might have a slight extra chance of distraction, but I couldn’t see any data on that with a quick DDG search

Buses drive outside.

People tend to step outside for a smoke.

So yeah, you actually might be more likely to get hit by a bus if you smoke, your smoking spot is anywhere near a bus route, and you are ducking out there 2-4 times a day to stand there smoking while you play with your phone.

It references general body health and the sorts of things that make you age and die. Heart health, lung condition, oral health, stroke risk, skin quality, etc. All of that stuff is affected negatively by smoking. Stopping nearly instantly makes these things better, and they improve over time. So basically if you stop smoking, any way you could die of natural causes drops.

If you got hit by a bus your chance for recovery would be better as a non-smoker than a smoker.

Dying from all causes sounds like a really rough last page.

I’d think it would be pretty hard for one person to die from all of them

It means your life expectancy immediately increases. There are some things that, depending on your age, improving won’t improve life expectancy. ie, a 99 year old doing something that reduces their risk of colon cancer but nothing else will not reduce their chances of dying because something else will kill them first with 100% certainty.

Quitting smoking decreases risk of death for absolutely everyone in every circumstance

Let’s say you’re a smoker and your workplace says you have to go outside to smoke.

It’s the middle of November, it’s cold, it’s rainy, you’re outside smoking and get pneumonia.

Your lungs are already weak from smoking and the pneumonia kills you.

If you quit smoking, you would have been inside, dry, safe, less likely to contract pneumonia and less likely to die from it if you get it.

Basically yeah, obviously no. Cause of death isn’t broken down nearly as far as people think it is. You can check it out on the CDC’s Web portal. So while you can get the results for motor vehicle accidents, you may not get the results for motor vehicle versus pedestrian.

So all they’re actually claiming is that in the statistics, people who quit smoking are less represented in every category.

Yeah sure, when you get a coughing fit so hard that you can barely breathe and a bus crashes into ya.

It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.