Hoyer N, et al. - Whether smokers with incidental findings of interstitial lung abnormalities have an increased mortality during long-term follow-up was investigated herein, and contributing causes of death were reviewed. In a lung cancer screening population of relatively healthy smokers, the presence of interstitial lung abnormalities was a common finding, which was associated with mortality regardless of the interstitial morphological phenotype. An association with lung cancer and non-pulmonary malignancies was shown to be partly responsible for the observed increased mortality.