Major study links cigarette smoking to
colorectal cancer.
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People who smoke cigarettes for 20 years or more are about 40 percent more likely to die of colon cancer than are non-smokers, according to a study that blames tobacco use for about 12 percent of US colon cancer deaths.
Researchers at the American Cancer Society surveyed the health and personal habits of 781,351 men and women over a 14 year period and found that colorectal cancer deaths are linked to how much and how long people smoke.
"It is clear that cigarette smoking is associated with colorectal cancer mortality for both men and women," said Ann Chao, a researcher with the American Cancer Society and first author of the study, which appears in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Chao said earlier lab studies showed that carcinogens in cigarette smoke may cause tumors in the colon and rectum and may damage the DNA in cells. The new study is the first to link cigarettes and colorectal cancer death among such a large number of people followed for such a long period of time she said.
Based on the study, Chao concluded that of the approximately 56,000 Americans who die annually of colorectal cancer, about 6,600 of the deaths, some 12 percent, are associated with cigarette smoking.
Colorectal cancer is diagnosed in more than 780,000 people worldwide annually, according to the World Health Organization. there are about 129,4000 cases of colorectal cancer identified in the US annually, according to 1999 figures from the American Cancer Society.
Cigarette smoking is identified by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention as the cause of 160,000 deaths from eight kinds of cancer, but colorectal cancer is not included on that list as a disease linked to tobacco use, said Chao.
Chao and her co-authors suggest in the study that colorectal cancer now should be classified as a 'smoking-related cancer'.
Dr. Bernard Levin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said the study gives strong support for classifying colorectal cancer as a smoking-related illness.
"This study and others show that there is a high risk of colorectal cancer after 20 years or more of exposure [smoking]," he said.
Levin, the vice-president for cancer prevention at MD Anderson said the new study shows a clear dose-related effect from smoking: The more one smokes the greater the risk of cancer.
Smoking also has been linked to death from heart and pulmonary disease. The CDC estimates that smoking causes more then 400,000 premature deaths each year.
In the research, Chao and her colleagues found that 4,432 people in the study group died of colon or rectal cancer over the 14 year period.
An analysis of the smoking habits of the 781,351 in the study, said Chao, showed the risk of colorectal cancer death increased steeply among 20 year smokers.
The risk of death from the disease, she said, was directly linked to the number of cigarettes smoked and to the number of years that a person smoked.
The age when smoking started also played a role, said Chao. People who started the habit before the age of 15 had a 47 percent greater risk of dying form colorectal cancer than did those who never smoked.
Cancer stats here: lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer.
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