We have recently shown that cigarette smoke yield (TNCO) depends linearly on the difference between the time of smouldering and the time of smoking using several machine smoking regimes (CORESTA 2012), with the filter ventilation open or blocked. It is obvious that the smoker’s exposure increases when the intensity of smoking increases, i.e. when the smoking time decreases. However, from our previous observations, we wanted to know whether human smoking yields could also be predicted through the measurement of human smoking time. For this purpose, a smoking behaviour controlled study was carried out to compare the human nicotine smoking yields obtained by both filter tip analysis and the cigarette burning time model. The results of our study show that i) smoke exposure, defined here as nicotine human smoking yield, can be assessed by measuring the smoking time and also ii) this smoke exposure is a linear function of the smoking time whatever the smoking behaviour.

In this presentation, the experimental set up and the results will be discussed as well as limitations and perspectives.