TY - JOUR T1 - Tobacco smoking: why do physicians not make diagnoses? JF - European Respiratory Review JO - EUROPEAN RESPIRATORY REVIEW SP - 62 LP - 63 DO - 10.1183/09059180.00007210 VL - 20 IS - 119 AU - F. Cosci AU - F. Pistelli AU - L. Carrozzi Y1 - 2011/03/01 UR - http://err.ersjournals.com/content/20/119/62.abstract N2 - To the Editors:Tobacco smoking is recognised as the single greatest cause of avoidable morbidity and mortality in developed countries. An enormous amount of scientific evidence to support this statement has been collected in the past 60 yrs. Searching for “tobacco smoking and diseases” through PubMed provides results for 62,976 papers published since 1950. Notwithstanding this, physicians often forget that tobacco smoking, in addition to being a cause of many different diseases, is a disease itself.In 1980, for the first time in the history of disease classification, the diagnosis of tobacco dependence was included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).In 1988, the US Surgeon General issued a seminal report entitled “Nicotine Addiction”, in which it was clearly stated that cigarettes were addictive, nicotine was the drug in tobacco that causes addiction, and tobacco addiction was similar to other substance addictions, such as to heroin or cocaine.In 1992, the World Health Organization (WHO) included tobacco smoking under the “Mental and Behavioural Disorders” and, in the International Classification of Diseases 10, tobacco dependence has been defined as “a cluster of behavioural, cognitive and physiological phenomena that develop after repeated use”.In 1994, the DSM IV referred to nicotine dependence and nicotine withdrawal as psychiatric disorders, and the DSM IV Text Revised (DSM IV-TR) introduced the section of nicotine use … ER -