Can active smoking cause breast cancer?

✍ Scribed by G.H. Miller

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 63 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1074-9098
• DOI: 10.1016/s1074-9098(01)00258-1

✦ Synopsis

Can active smoking cause breast cancer?

An analysis of the data from the Erie County Study on Smoking and Health on the effect of smoking on breast cancer incidence showed that smoking appears to increase breast cancer mortality when compared to nonsmoking women. The study is based on detailed population information collected from 12,580 relatives of the deceased over a 20-year period from 1972-1991 in Erie County, Pennsylvania. The present study makes use of two different categories: nonsmoking women (women who smoked less than 100 cigarettes during their lifetime) and women smokers (women who smoked all their lives, women who stopped smoking before they died, and women who started in later life). The results from the population data for breast cancer mortality were nonsmoking women 4.66% (379 cases out of 8139 deaths) and smoking women 5.7% (253 cases out of 4441 deaths). These data provide important information showing the detrimental effects of smoking for women compared with nonsmoking women. The data show that smokers contract breast cancer at a rate that is 1.22 times greater than that of nonsmoking women. Therefore much greater emphasis should be placed upon smoking cessation to reduce the deaths due to breast cancer.