Was Bonnie Franklin a smoker? Does it matter? Is it too soon? Well TheCount.com readers want to know which means it’s not too soon and it does matter! So the question is, was Bonnie Franklin a smoker? And if so, did her smoking contribute to her death? The answer is, yes, no and maybe.
I have no idea if Bonnie smoked, either at the time of her death or at any other time in her life, but if she did smoke it could have contributed to her death. The “One Day At A Time” actress underwent treatment for pancreatic cancer in 2012 before subsuming to the disease one year later at age 69.
There were an estimated 40,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer every year, according to the National Cancer Institute, and one in 71 have a chance of developing pancreatic cancer sometime in his or her lifetime.
The following things could increase your chances of contracting the disease;
aging, the average age a person is diagnosed with the cancer is 72, being male, being African American, smoking, being obese, having a family history, and having certain conditions (such as diabetes) are also risk factors for the disease, the American Cancer Society reported.
Franklin joins a number of other notable names who have fallen to this disease.
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She may have smoked once-- she was born in 1944, after all, long before people knew how really dangerous it was. But I am guessing she quit, if she ever did smoke, because she narrated a PSA that was shown in health classes around the country on the dangers of smoking. I doubt the producers would choose a celebrity who was known to be a smoker for that. She also maintained a very youthful-sounding voice until the end, and that suggests that if she smoked, ever, she probably quit at some point. She did a lot of musical theater, and may have wanted to preserve her voice.
The kind of rapidly progressing pancreatic cancer she had is more common among Ashkenazic Jews, which she was, albeit, she doesn't look it, and the fact isn't well known, but she was an Ashkenazi Jew on both sides of her family. My father was Jewish, and not even fully Ashkenazic, but he died of the same thing in a very similar way. At 67, in November, he was diagnosed, and died in the middle of the following March, back in 1998.
Michael Landon was also Jewish, FWIW, although I don;t know for sure whether he was Ashkenazic.
Yes, she was a tobacco addict, yes it caused her death. Just asked Michael Landon, who also smoker. No, wait, you can't because he ALSO died of pancreatic cancer at an early age!
BAN THE ILLEGAL TOBACCO DRUG, NOW!