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.

Yes. Everyone knows the bus comes when you light a cigarette.

Lights Cigarette

Immediately assassinated by Truck-Kun

Gets Isekai Anime with Absurdly Specific Title

Profit?

“All-cause mortality” simply means death from all (or any) causes.

So for smokers, you got a buttload of people with this thing in common, and rather than look specifically at something like deaths from lung cancer, you take a step back and look at deaths from anything. And then go in and try to find correlations and help to understand those correlations.

It’s kind of a chicken and egg scenario, because some of those causes might not be from smoking, but from a person’s proclivity to smoke.

For example, smokers might possibly be more impulsive than non-smokers (generally speaking) and there might be a higher risk of motor vehicle fatalities in the smoker group, but the cause wouldn’t be smoking, it’d be underlying behavioral differences that would make someone more likely to smoke.

It’s basically looking at mortality from a distance as opposed to looking at very specific things up close (but with the data it lets people zoom in on everything)

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

It means all causes collectively, not each and every cause individually.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Smoking makes you more visible because of the trail of smoke giving away your location - cessation makes it harder for cars to hunt you down and run you over.

Less sarcastically it’s a way of saying that your overall life expectancy is increasing as it decreases the probability that you’d die from a pretty wide array of causes… that bus is going to hit you regardless of how much you smoke but it’s less likely something else kills you first.