Tag Archive for 'smoking'

Less women dying from lung cancer

Published on May 7, 2011 in Health and Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

For the first time ever, the death rates for women dying from lung cancer are decreasing. Even though it is a minuscule amount, a little less than 1 percent a year, it still provides hope towards the battle against lung cancer.

Unfortunately lung cancer is still the nation’s, as well as the world’s, leading cancer killer. This said, this drop has been anticipated for a long time. A similar decrease began in U.S. men about ten years ago. Elizabeth Ward of the American Cancer Society, said “It looks like we’ve turned the corner.”

Thanks to the success against some of the main types of cancer – breast, prostate and colorectal, and lung cancer in men, death rates from cancer have been slowly dwindling for years. Preventing cancer is more beneficial than treating it, and the U.S. has reported small but significant declines in new cases as well.

The new report reveals that death rates have fallen on an average of 1.6 percent a year between 2003 and 2007, which is the latest data available. The researchers reported in the National Cancer Institute that rates of new diagnoses have diminished almost 1 percent a year.

Diagnosis and deaths are still on the increase for other types of cancer such as liver, kidney, melanoma and pancreatic cancer. Also, cancer is predominately a disease of the older population, and it is swiftly aging.

In general, men were heavier smokers long before women, which caused men’s lung cancer deaths to skyrocket first. Then in the early 1990s, death rates started to fall, and less young men fell into the habit. The new report showed that those rates were decreasing by 3 percent a year between 2005 and 2007. Researchers have been expecting the same thing to happen with women, so they began noting signs that death rates had started to slowly fall for a few years. Now that they have a straight five year trend, they are assured that the decrease is real, according to Brenda Edwards, a statistician from the National Cancer Institute.

Edwards mentioned that the cigarette industry targeted women in the late 1960s and ’70s. She called this “the Virginia Slims effect”. This escalated smoking for some young women around this time. She said that the death rate may temporarily be increased for these women as they get older.

Lung cancer is projected to kill more than 159,000 Americans this year. About 70,500 will be women.

Smoking may increase risk for breast cancer

Published on April 28, 2009 in Health and Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

It has long been a fact that smoking causes lung cancer and is a culprit in several other cancers as well, but, until recently, scientists have usually claimed that it did not have an effect on breast cancer. A Canadian panel of experts is now disputing the long-standing view.

On Thursday, April 23, the panel revealed the findings from new studies indicating that smoking increases the risk of breast cancer and cautioned that young women and girls were vulnerable to certain risks when exposed to smoke. Even exposure to secondhand smoke during their important period of development may raise their risk for breast cancer later in life.

In the report, heavy evidence was found that secondhand smoke played a key role in pre-menopausal breast cancer, but did not find enough proof that it increased the risk in post-menopausal breast cancer.

In the wake of these findings, most scientists say that there is not enough evidence to conclude that smoking plays a role in breast cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer said in a current report that there is scarce if any link between active smoking and breast cancer. In 2006, the surgeon general’s office announced that there was not enough evidence to claim that secondhand smoke causes breast cancer.

A message women have received in the past is that you must go and get a mammogram because there is nothing you can do to stop breast cancer. Dr. Anthony Miller, a member of the panel and associate director for research of the University of Toronto’s school of public health, says that is total nonsense. He said, “You can be more physically active. You can eat a good diet and avoid becoming overweight. Do not drink heavily – and do not smoke.” Miller said, in so many words, is the main thing for young women to realize is that if you smoke, you not only increase your risk for lung cancer but for breast cancer as well.

Study compares the risks of smoking with being overweight

Published on March 10, 2009 in Health and Wellness. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

When the risks of obesity were compared with those of smoking, a substantial study performed in Europe over several decades has found that young overweight men at 18 were as likely to die at 60 as light smokers. Even more alarming is that obese teens, like heavy smokers, were at twice the risk of dying early.

While obesity is said to cause many health problems, these new discoveries conflict with a multitude of recent studies that revealed that people who are just overweight are not necessarily at an increased risk for an early death.

This new study, which was published in last week’s British Medical Journal, traced the death rates of 45,920 Swedish men over a period of 38 years. The researchers discovered that the obese men who signed up for the Swedish army in 1969  and 1970 were more than two times likely to be at risk of dying by age 60, than those of normal weight. This is almost the same accumulation in risk confronting those recruits who were of normal weight but smoked half a pack of cigarettes or more per day.

The study found that overweight recruits who did not smoke were about a third more likely to die early, an increase in risk that is almost the same as that for normal- weight men who smoked up to  10 cigarettes a day.

Martin Neovius, the first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said “We know that health behaviors are established early on in life” so the message for teens is “If you already are smoking, then smoking cessation combined with weight maintenance counseling would probably be a good idea.”

Regardless of the expansiveness of the new study, some experts say that the findings may overemphasize the risks of being overweight. The researchers alluded to the fact that the weight of the men was known only when they enrolled in the military at age 18. Dr. David Williamson, a visiting professor at Emory University who has studied obesity and it’s effect on health, said that because most people gain weight as they get older, the overweight teens most likely went on to become obese adults, so their deaths may be attributed to being obese, not overweight earlier in their life.