Smoking, Risk Factor for Pancreatic Cancer

Published on August 25, 2009 2:17 AM

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As it is know smoking is the main cause of almost diseases. One of these diseases is pancreatic cancer. A recent study of almost 1,500 people with pancreatic cancer attested that cigarette smoking boosts the risk of the disease.

Anti-tobacco researchers also found that, given an identical total exposure to smoking, a person who smoked less for a longer period of time would be at greater risk of pancreatic cancer than someone who smoked more for a shorter period of time. To better understand how patterns of exposure to cigarettes may relate to disease risk, Dr. Shannon M. Lynch, of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues analyzed data for 1,481 people with the disease and 1,539 healthy controls from the International Pancreatic Cancer Cohort Consortium.

At the end of investigation the researchers found that smokers were 1.77 times more likely than other people who had never smoked to develop pancreatic cancer. The risk depends of the amount of cigarettes a person smoke daily, the length of time that they smoke, and the total number of packs a person smoke daily and the number of years they smoked.

Researchers found that people who had quit smoking 10 years beforehand were still at increased risk of pancreatic cancer, while the risk for people who had quit for 15 years was similar to that of people who had never smoked. Similar risk models have been seen for lung cancer, bladder cancer, cancer of the oral cavity, kidney cancer, and esophageal cancer, they add, which explained that smoking may increase the risk of all of these cancer types through alike mechanisms. For example the current analysis found 15% of all pancreatic cases were due to cigarette smoking. Pancreatic cancer is the fourth-leading cause of death due to the cancer in the US, with fewer than 5% of people surviving for five years after being diagnosed with the disease.

Pancreatic cancer is particularly deadly because there is no way to screen for it, so people are often diagnosed late. Investigators concluded that cigarette smoke contains a large number of carcinogens (cancer causing chemicals). Therefore, it is not surprising that cigarette smoking is one of the biggest risk factors for developing pancreatic cancer. For example, smoking during college has been associated with a 2-3 fold increased risk of pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is proportionally more common in Jews than the rest of the American population. This may be because of a particular inherited mutation in the breast cancer gene (BRCA2) which runs in some Jewish families, added researchers.