Researchers say your lung cancer risk is lower from smoking filtered cigarettes, but there’s little difference if you smoke “light” cigarettes.

Share on Pinterest The risk of lung cancer is different for different cigarettes, but experts say you’re much better off not smoking. Getty Images

Today’s cigarettes are a lot different than your grandparent’s cigarettes.

Flavors, chemicals, filters, tar levels, packaging: They’ve all changed over the decades.

But that doesn’t mean they’re safer.

New research presented today reports that while people who smoked filtered cigarettes were less likely to die of lung cancer than those who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, there was no difference in health outcomes between those who smoked “light” cigarettes from those who smoked regular ones.

But experts contend that even the difference between filtered and unfiltered may be somewhat overstated. Instead they say the findings add to the evidence that smoking cigarettes of any type is dangerous.

The study, led by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina, found that people who smoked unfiltered cigarettes were 40 percent more likely to develop lung cancer and nearly twice as likely to die from it than those who smoked filtered cigarettes.

They were also more dependent on nicotine and 30 percent more likely to die of any cause.

But the changes of developing or dying from lung cancer were no different between smokers of regular cigarettes and those who smoked “light” or “ultralight” ones.

The researchers also found the light or ultralight cigarette smokers were on average less dependent on nicotine, but they were also less likely to quit smoking.

“While popular belief may be that a switch to light/ultralight cigarettes is a safer option, this study demonstrates that there is no difference in clinical outcomes between regular and light/ultralight cigarette smokers,” the study’s authors wrote.

Stanton Glantz, PhD, who researches smoking’s health effects and tobacco control efforts at the University of San Francisco, agrees.

“The results comparing light/mild with ‘full flavor’ cigs confirms what we already know, namely that light/mild is a fraud,” Glantz told Healthline.

“The fact that users mistakenly think that they are healthier could be contributing to the lower likelihood of quitting smoking among smokers of light cigarettes,” he added.

It could also help explain, he notes, the lower likelihood — or at least mixed results — of quitting among those who use e-cigarettes.

“We have known for many years that cigarettes that were misleadingly marketed by the tobacco industry as ‘light’ or ‘ultralight’ were not meaningfully less lethal than other cigarettes,” Eric Jacobs, PhD, senior scientific director of epidemiology research at the American Cancer Society, told Healthline.

That fact has led to bans on the terms, he notes.