All Viewers Pay to Keep TV Sports Fans Happy

Michael Perez/Associated Press

NBC cameras at an N.F.L. game last month in Philadelphia.

For a glimpse of how out of control sports bidding wars have become, look no further than your cable television bill.

Time Warner Cable subscribers in Southern California will eventually see their monthly bills increase thanks to an impending $7 billion deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the most lucrative for any sports team in history. DirecTV, the country’s most popular satellite service, and Verizon FiOS have started adding a $2 to $3 monthly surcharge in markets like New York and Los Angeles to pay for regional sports networks.

Per-subscriber fees for sports networks keep going up: ESPN, the granddaddy of them all, passed the $5-a-month mark last year.

The eye-popping price tags have restarted debate about a topic near and dear to sports fans, fairness: many TV customers never watch the mightily expensive channels at all, yet almost all must pay. There was a shudder in the industry when John Malone, the business tycoon who helped create the modern-day cable system, said in November that “runaway sports rights” costs amounted to “a high tax on a lot of households that don’t have a lot of interest in sports.” The only short-term fix, he said, was government intervention.

The price increases reflect the leverage big sports leagues have as distributors like Time Warner Cable and programmers like ESPN desperately try to hang onto live programming in the age of the digital video recorder and the Internet.

Sports are the television industry’s bulwark against rapid technological change: while the companies fear cord-cutting by customers who can cobble together a diet of TV on the Internet, they rest a little easier knowing that former customers would be hard-pressed to find their favorite teams live online.

Pretty much everybody in the business agrees that the overall costs are outrageous. Nobody has an easy solution.

The latest example of this is likely to come on Monday when the Dodgers’ owners are expected to announce a 20- to 25-year deal to create a regional sports network with Time Warner Cable. The cost per subscriber in Southern California is likely to be between $4 and $5 a month, though Time Warner Cable will swallow some of the amount itself.

In assessing the impending Dodgers deal, Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Nomura Securities, wondered earlier this week “if we have reached the top of the sports rights bubble.”

But while the price is steep, the alternative might have been worse; the other bidder, Fox Sports, could have turned around and charged Time Warner Cable even more per subscriber.

“When a team sees their rights fees, and therefore the costs to consumers, rise more than sixfold, as is rumored, for the exact same games that they got last season, that’s an unsustainable model,” said Dan York, who oversees DirecTV’s decisions to carry and not carry networks. Yet Mr. York said DirecTV hopes to continue to carry the Dodgers in the years to come.

As both he and his counterparts at Time Warner Cable know, the games are popular with a segment of its customer base.

News Corporation, knowing the same thing, acquired a 49 percent stake in the Yankees-branded YES Network for nearly $2 billion two months ago. News Corporation is planning a national rival to ESPN, tentatively named Fox Sports 1, joining other competitors like Comcast, which has the one-year-old NBC Sports Network, and CBS, which has the CBS Sports Network. The National Football League has its own network, which clawed its way onto all the major distributors’ channel lineups despite costing nearly $1 per subscriber per month. An increasing number of college conferences have their own television homes, as well.

For the most part, all of these networks are requirements, not options for cable customers. (Some distributors charge extra for special packages of sports channels for die-hard fans, but the big networks remain in the basic packages that most customers get.) Some games are hugely popular: On the high end of the ratings, NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” averaged 21.4 million viewers this season. But Dodgers games, like those of many local teams, were lucky to garner 100,000 viewers on any given day.

But analysts and industry critics say that if anything ever causes distributors to try more of an “à la carte” model of pricing, it’s sports programming.

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Lawmaker questions Disney's plan for wristband data

A congressman from Massachusetts raised questions Thursday about how Walt Disney Co. will use information it collects when it gives parkgoers new wristbands embedded with computer chips.

Edward J. Markey (D-Mass), who co-chairs a congressional panel on privacy, asked Walt Disney Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Robert A. Iger in a letter what information the park will collect with the so-called MagicBand and how it will be used.

"Widespread use of MagicBand bracelets by park guests could dramatically increase the personal data Disney can collect about its guests," he said, adding that he is particularly concerned at the prospects of Disney collecting information about children.

Disney announced recently that it plans to unveil this spring at Walt Disney World in Florida a wristband embedded with radio frequency identification chips. A unique code in each chip lets parkgoers pay to enter the park, check into Disney hotels and buy food and souvenirs, among other things.

Disney officials promoted the wristbands as a way to make visiting the park easier. The wristbands will let Disney use the data to customize future offerings and marketing pitches.

Disney officials say they have no plans yet to introduce the wristbands at Disneyland or Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim.

In a three-page letter, Markey said he is "deeply concerned that Disney's proposal could potentially have a harmful impact on our children." He asked whether parkgoers will have a chance to opt out of sharing their information and, if not, whether Disney will share the data with other companies.

A spokesman for Markey said his office had not received a response from Disney on Thursday, but in a statement to The Times, the company said participation in the wristband program was optional.

"In addition, guests control whether their personal information is used for promotional purposes, and no data collected is ever used to market to children," the statement said.

If parkgoers agree to release such information it can be used for marketing, Disney officials confirmed.

hugo.martin@latimes.com

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Beyond Google Fiber: Google looks to create its own experimental wireless network

Look out, wireless carriers: Google (GOOG) may have its eye on shaking up your business as well. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google “is trying to create an experimental wireless network covering its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters” that “could portend the creation of dense and superfast Google wireless networks in other locations that would allow people to connect to the Web using their mobile devices.” But before anyone gets too excited about “Google Wireless” coming to their neighborhoods, the Journal notes that documents Google filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the network will “use frequencies that wouldn’t be compatible with nearly any of the consumer mobile devices that exist today, such as Apple’s (AAPL) iPad or iPhone or most devices powered by Google’s Android operating system.” So for now it looks as though Google’s wireless network is still squarely in the experimental phase and won’t be rolling out across the country anytime soon.

[More from BGR: Unlocking your smartphone will be illegal starting next week]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Legendary Japanese filmmakers to be honored by Hollywood

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and three of his compatriots will be honored by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) next month for their lifetime of work on movies that organizers said have “given us all a taste of the sublime.”

The WGA’s West branch, which represents the U.S. West Coast writers of TV, films, radio and Internet programming, said that the late Kurosawa and his collaborators Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni and Shinobu Hashimoto, will receive the Guild’s 2013 Jean Renoir Award for Screenwriting Achievement on February 17 in Los Angeles.

The 94-year-old Hashimoto is the lone surviving member of the group. He is not expected to attend the ceremony.

The annual award honors “those non-U.S. writers whose work has raised the bar for all of us,” said Writers Guild of America West Vice President Howard Rodman.

“These four men, working in loose collaboration, are responsible for writing many, many masterpieces – films that reflect the Japanese culture, and have given all of us a taste of the sublime,” Rodman added in a statement.

Kurosawa, who received an honorary Oscar in 1990 and died in 1998, found success in many films by collaborating with Kikushima, Hashimoto and Oguni on screenplays.

With Kikushima, the duo co-wrote such classics as “Stray Dog” (1949) and “Yojimbo” (1961). Hashimoto worked with Kurosawa on the seminal 1950 film “Rashomon.” Oguni, Hashimoto and Kurosawa came together on 1952′s “Ikiru” and 1954′s “Seven Samurai.” The entire quartet wrote such films as 1957′s “Throne of Blood” and 1958′s “The Hidden Fortress.”

Kikushima died in 1989. Oguni died in 1996.

Previous recipients of the award include the late Italian screenwriters Suso D’Amico in 2009 and Tonino Guerra in 2011.

(Reporting By Zorianna Kit; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Will Dunham)

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The New Old Age Blog: Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis

When the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness — pays close attention. Invariably, complaints ensue.

“We asked for commentary,” said David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has spent six years as chairman of the task force that is updating the handbook. He sounded unruffled. “We asked for it and we got it. This was not going to be done in a dark room somewhere.”

But the D.S.M. 5, to be published in May, has generated an unusual amount of heat. Two changes, in particular, could have considerable impact on older people and their families.

First, the new volume revises some of the criteria for major depressive disorder. The D.S.M. IV (among other changes, the new manual swaps Roman numerals for Arabic ones) set out a list of symptoms that over a two-week period would trigger a diagnosis of major depression: either feelings of sadness or emptiness, or a loss of interest or pleasure in most daily activities, plus sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, distraction or other problems, to the extent that they impair someone’s functioning.

Traditionally, depression has been underdiagnosed in older adults. When people’s health suffers and they lose friends and loved ones, the sentiment went, why wouldn’t they be depressed? A few decades back, Dr. Kupfer said, “what was striking to me was the lack of anyone getting a depression diagnosis, because that was ‘normal aging.’” We don’t find depression in old age normal any longer.

But critics of the D.S.M. 5 now argue that depression may become overdiagnosed, because this version removes the so-called “bereavement exclusion.” That was a paragraph that cautioned against diagnosing depression in someone for at least two months after loss of a loved one, unless that patient had severe symptoms like suicidal thoughts.

Without that exception, you could be diagnosed with this disorder if you are feeling empty, listless or distracted, a month after your parent or spouse dies.

“D.S.M. 5 is medicalizing the expected and probably necessary process of mourning that people go through,” said Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force and has denounced several of the changes in the new edition. “Most people get better with time and natural healing and resilience.”

If they are diagnosed with major depression before that can happen, he fears, they will be given antidepressants they may not need. “It gives the drug companies the right to peddle pills for grief,” he said.

An advisory committee to the Association for Death Education and Counseling also argued that bereaved people “will receive antidepressant medication because it is cheaper and ‘easier’ to medicate than to be involved therapeutically,” and noted that antidepressants, like all medications, have side effects.

“I can’t help but see this as a broad overreach by the APA,” Eric Widera, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on the GeriPal blog. “Grief is not a disorder and should be considered normal even if it is accompanied by some of the same symptoms seen in depression.”

But Dr. Kupfer said the panel worried that with the exclusion, too many cases of depression could be overlooked and go untreated. “If these things go on and get worse over time and begin to impair someone’s day to day function, we don’t want to use the excuse, ‘It’s bereavement — they’ll get over it,’” he said.

The new entry for major depressive disorder will include a note — the wording isn’t final — pointing out that while grief may be “understandable or appropriate” after a loss, professionals should also consider the possibility of a major depressive episode. Making that distinction, Dr. Kupfer said, will require “good solid clinical judgment.”

Initial field trials testing the reliability of D.S.M. 5 diagnoses, recently published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, don’t bolster confidence, however. An editorial remarked that “the end results are mixed, with both positive and disappointing findings.” Major depressive disorder, for instance, showed “questionable reliability.”

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about how patients might respond to the D.S.M. 5, and to a new diagnosis that might also affect a lot of older people — mild neurocognitive disorder.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force. He is Allen Frances, not Francis.

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HCA Must Pay Kansas City Foundation $162 Million

HCA, the nation’s largest profit-making hospital chain, was ordered on Thursday to pay $162 million after a judge in Missouri ruled that it had failed to abide by an agreement to make improvements to dilapidated hospitals that it bought in the Kansas City area several years ago.

The judge also ordered a court-appointed accountant to determine whether HCA had actually provided the levels of charitable care that it agreed to at the time.

The ruling came in response to a suit filed in 2009 by a community foundation that was created when HCA acquired the hospitals. Among other things, the foundation was responsible for ensuring that HCA met the obligations outlined in the deal.

The dispute in Kansas City is the second time in recent years that HCA has come under legal fire from officials in communities that sold troubled nonprofit community hospitals to HCA.

In another dispute in New Hampshire in 2011, a judge ruled in HCA’s favor, deciding that Portsmouth Regional Hospital would remain part of HCA after community leaders tried to regain control. During testimony in a 2011 trial, a former hospital official claimed he had difficulties getting HCA to pay for what he and others described as critical equipment and facility upgrades.

In an e-mailed statement, a spokesman for HCA said the company was disappointed in the court’s ruling and intended to appeal. He also added that the two cases were “rare exceptions” and that the company had enjoyed positive relationships with communities across the country.

The suit is among several problems for HCA. The company disclosed last year, for example, that the United States attorney’s office in Miami had subpoenaed documents as part of an inquiry to determine whether unnecessary cardiology procedures had been performed at HCA hospitals in Florida and elsewhere. At stake in that case is whether HCA inappropriately billed Medicare and private insurers for the procedures. HCA has denied any wrongdoing.

Financially, Thursday’s judgment is a slap on the wrist for HCA, which posted net income of $360 million in just the third quarter of last year. But the ruling may reverberate beyond HCA as communities across the country put their troubled nonprofit hospitals up for sale.

In many cases, the buyers with the deepest pockets have been profit-making hospital chains that want to convert the community hospitals to profit status, typically agreeing to spend money to fix them and to maintain certain levels of charitable care in the community.

In 2011, for instance, Vanguard Health Systems, which went public that year and has as its largest shareholder the private equity firm Blackstone Group, bought eight hospitals in Detroit. As part of that deal, Vanguard Health agreed to spend $850 million over five years to fix and maintain the hospitals.

The trouble in the Kansas City area began a year after HCA acquired a dozen hospitals from Health Midwest in 2003 for $1.125 billion. As part of the deal, HCA agreed to make $300 million in capital improvements in the first two years and an additional $150 million in the following three. The hospital chain also agreed to maintain the levels of care that had been provided to low-income individuals and families in the area for 10 years.

But when the members of the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City, a nonprofit created from the proceeds of the sale of the hospital, received their first report from HCA in 2004 they discovered the hospital was already way behind.

Of the $300 million it was supposed to spend in the first two years, its own documents showed it had spent only about $50 million, according to Mark G. Flaherty, one of the founding members of the foundation and its general counsel.

HCA’s reports to the foundation also indicated that the level of charitable care it provided at the system’s large inner-city hospital had fallen while charitable care provided at the more affluent suburban hospital had risen sharply, Mr. Flaherty said.

“That was a big red flag to us,” he said.

After repeatedly asking HCA executives for explanations but receiving none, the foundation sued HCA in 2009. The case went to trial for several weeks in 2011.

HCA argued in the trial that it had met its obligation to spend money on hospital facilities by building two new hospitals at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than repairing older facilities. But Judge John Torrence of Jackson County Circuit Court ruled that the agreement called for improvements to existing hospitals.

He said HCA still owed $162 million of the $300 million it had agreed to spend between 2003 and 2005. He then named a court-appointed forensic accountant to determine whether HCA had met its other capital commitments and whether it provided the charitable care it had said it would.

HCA’s own written statements claimed “differing amounts,” the judge wrote in his ruling. One HCA report said it provided $48 million in charitable care to the area in 2009 while another report on its Web site said it provided more than $87 million. The annual report to the foundation claimed it provided $185 million in uncompensated and charity care that year, the judge wrote.

During the trial, when asked about the widely differing numbers, the president of HCA’s Midwest division and other HCA executives had no explanation.

The money will be paid to the foundation, which will use it to create grants to provide care for uninsured or underinsured families in the area. It is unclear whether the spending on improvements will occur.

Depending on what the court-appointed accountant discovers, HCA may owe even more money, said Paul Seyferth of Seyferth Blumenthal & Harris, which represents the foundation.

“We think they’re going to have a tremendously difficult time convincing anybody that they spent what they claim they spent,” Mr. Seyferth said.

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Ki Suh Park dies at 80; architect helped rebuild L.A. after riots

From rubble and wreckage, Ki Suh Park often saw possibility. It was so as he stood amid the destruction of the Korean War, when he resolved to study architecture and help rebuild his homeland. And it was so as he drove down Western Avenue after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when he vowed to help rebuild a community after the violence that wracked his adopted home.

Park, an architect who rose to become a leader in the city's Korean American community, died Jan. 16 at Stanford University Medical Center after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his family said. He was 80.

Antonia Hernandez, an immigrant rights activist who served with him on Rebuild L.A., a campaign to help rebuild and revitalize riot-stricken areas, credits Park with representing the Korean community while encouraging consensus during a time when tensions were still raw.

"Ki Suh gave voice to these people and their concerns, their anger, their frustration, but he did it in a way that didn't add to the tension and the confrontation," Hernandez said this week in an interview with The Times.

Park loved the vibrancy and diversity of Los Angeles, and often said that the city gave him energy. He delighted in the concept of Korean tacos. "Only in America, only in L.A.," he would tell friends.

His journey to both places began with a letter.

Ki Suh Park was born March 15, 1932, in Seoul, Korea, the second of nine children of Seung Man Park, an agricultural geneticist, and Haechung Im Park, a schoolteacher. Park lived with relatives to continue his studies in Seoul after his parents left to find work.

As the Korean War began, Park was 18 and feared he'd be forced to join invading communist forces. He went into hiding.

"Guests are coming," his grandparents would warn as soldiers approached, and he and his sister would scramble to take cover behind furniture. Eventually, he made his way to Pusan, where he worked as a translator for the U.S. Joint Advisory Command.

When he told U.S. soldiers about his dreams of studying abroad, they encouraged him to write to American newspapers seeking sponsorship. He did, and the Los Angeles Times printed his letter on May 5, 1952.

"I am anxious to continue an education in the United States in order to be of value to the rebuilding of Korea," he wrote.

His words caught the interest of a number of luminaries, including illustrator Norman Rockwell and author James Michener. In the end, a friend of Rockwell's, a Montebello family, and an Indiana congressman helped Park immigrate. He even shook hands with future presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy.

"Today, Korea's buildings are broken and destroyed," a 21-year-old Park told The Times upon his arrival in March 1953. "But one day the war in Korea will be over. Then Korea will rebuild. I want to take part in rebuilding it."

But Park never would return to live in Korea, becoming an American citizen instead. He studied at East L.A. College and then UC Berkeley, where met and married his wife, Ildong. He graduated in 1957, a Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree in architecture, and went on to earn graduate degrees in architecture and city planning at MIT. He became a father, an architect, and soon, an Angeleno.

In 1961, Gruen Associates, a prominent architecture firm in Los Angeles, hired Park at a time when few firms had Asian Americans in their ranks. Early on, he and his family lived a simple life in an apartment on Westmoreland Avenue, near downtown. Often, he would come home, have dinner, and go back to the office to keep working.

"I had such faith in the future," Park told The Times in 1994. "Faith that if I work really hard and do my best, opportunity will open up for me and that's what attracted me to come to this country. I still believe that."

By the time he became a partner at Gruen in 1972, Park had earned a reputation for exacting standards and perfectionism. Anyone who worked with Park remembers toiling for hours on a drawing or memo, only to have it returned with typos and errors highlighted.

Thom Mayne, who worked under Park before becoming a premier architect, remembers the demands Park put on others, and on himself. "He just moved at the speed of light. He moved the way his brain moved. If you didn't move there with him, that was your problem," said Mayne, adding that Park influenced the way he runs his Morphosis practice today.

Park, who rose to managing partner of Gruen in 1981, oversaw a number of landmark Los Angeles projects, including the expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center (along with Pei Cobb Freed and Partners), the planning and design of the 105 Freeway, the Koreatown Plaza, the Segerstrom Concert Hall in Orange County, and planning for the Metro Gold and Orange lines. The convention center and the 105 Freeway, in particular, were "urban environment game-changers," said Michael Enomoto, Gruen's current managing partner, who worked with Park for 40 years.

Park became known for the way he handled complex, multifaceted projects. During the contentious talks over the path of the 105 Freeway through a swath of urban neighborhoods, Park was credited with listening to residents' concerns about displacement and the effects on surrounding communities. He received plaudits for his work, becoming the first Korean American to be named to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1986.

Park also served on the boards of the county's Natural History Museum, the Korean American Museum in Koreatown and the California Community Foundation, among other civic organizations, insisting on the same high standards.

He approached his Rebuild L.A. efforts with the same seriousness, working to find common ground among Korean store owners and African American community members. "Our survival and the future of the city depend on it," he said. "The whole world lives in this city, and if we can make it happen, this can be the model for the future of the entire world."

Twenty years later, the measure of Rebuild L.A.'s successes is mixed.

"Sometimes, I feel like a tiny grain of sand," he told The Times in 1994. "But you can't remake the world overnight or remake the city overnight."

But always, he maintained faith in progress. "How do you know where you are in the ocean unless you have a benchmark?" he once told The Times.

For him, Park often said, his life's benchmarks were his children. His three sons attended UCLA, Harvard and Princeton. Two became lawyers, one a doctor. He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Ildong Park; sons David, Kevin and Edwin; four grandchildren and six siblings.

A memorial service will be held Thursday at 11 a.m. at the Westwood United Methodist Church, 10497 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

christine.maiduc@latimes.com

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Google dominates the mobile app market, has 5 of the top 6 apps in the U.S.

Wondering why Apple (AAPL) is sinking so much effort into building its own Maps application? Because it doesn’t want Google (GOOG) to gobble up all the revenue from big-name mobile applications. ComScore has published its most recent monthly review of the top iOS and Android apps in the United States ranked by unique visitors and has found that Google captured 5 of the top 6 spots with Google Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. In fact, Facebook (FB) was the only non-Google app to crack the top 6, although it also had the benefit of being the most-visited app in the entire country by a margin of more than 10 million unique visitors. iTunes was the only Apple app to crack the top 10, meanwhile, as it ranked eighth with roughly 46 million unique visitors last month.

[More from BGR: As data gets cheaper for Verizon to transmit, customers are paying more]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Obama inauguration TV viewership down by 17.2 million from 2009

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Some 20.6 million Americans watched President Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony and related events on television, according to ratings data on Wednesday. That’s down sharply from his first inauguration in 2009.

TV ratings company Nielsen said 18 U.S. television networks and cable channels carried live coverage over about six hours of Monday’s swearing-in ceremony, speech and parade in Washington.

Monday’s TV audience was a drop of 17.2 million from 2009, when 37.8 million Americans – the highest number since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration – watched Obama formally take office as the first black president in U.S. history.

The Nielsen figures did not measure viewers who watched Monday’s daylong ceremonies online via live streaming on many TV channels, nor overseas audiences.

Second-term inaugurations of U.S. presidents have traditionally drawn smaller numbers of viewers than those for first terms.

Reagan’s 1981 inauguration drew the biggest television audience of the past 44 years, attracting some 41.8 million U.S. viewers, according to Nielsen.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bill Trott)

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Well: Long Term Effects on Life Expectancy From Smoking

It is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.

But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.

“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”

The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.

Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.

Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?

Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.

Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?

“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.

The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.

“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.

It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.

“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.

The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.

People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.

Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.

From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.

“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”

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