Smoking Lung Cancer

Smoking is renowned as the main cause of lung cancer, especially cigarettes. 90% of all lung cancer death cases are caused by smoking. In United States, smoking also caused most of lung cancer cases, counting over 80%. It contains more than 50 substances that have dangerous effect for our body, such as; radioisotopes from the radon decay sequence, nitrosamine, and benzopyrene. Additionally, nicotine appears to reduce our immune system. Despite how smoking can cause a lot of disease including lung cancer, some people still make smoking as lifestyle.

In this past decade, lung cancer cases have greatly increased in women. The increase rate is even higher than in men. Once again, smoking is the main cause. In the past women rarely smoking, but now is different. Women who smoke (former smokers and current smokers) and take hormone therapy are at a much higher risk of dying of lung cancer. Women taking hormones were about 60% more likely to die of lung cancer than the women taking a placebo. Not surprisingly, the risk was highest for current smokers, followed by past smokers, and lowest for never smokers. Among the women who smoked (former or current smokers), 3.4% of those taking hormone therapy died of lung cancer compared to 2.3% for women taking the placebo. This is the study done by Chlebowski et al. published in 2009.

How long and how much a person smoking more likely increased the chance of developing lung cancer, the more and longer will make it worse. However, when a person stop smoking, this will make our body steadily fixed the damage that caused by smoking and contaminant particles are gradually removed. In addition, those who stop smoking shows having a better prognosis of lung cancer than those who still smoking, and those patients who smoke at the time of diagnosis have shorter survival times than those who have quit.

The danger of smoking is not just for the smokers, but all around them. Person who inhale the smoke are called passive smoking. It is also a cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers. Passive smoker can be someone who lived in an environment which most of them are smoking, as well as in working place. Studies from many countries in Europe, United States, UK and Australia show that passive smoking has a slightly higher risk in getting lung cancer. Even in recent investigation, it suggests that passive smoking is more dangerous than direct smoke inhalation.

From all lung cancer cases 10% to 15% are they who never smoked. It means over 30,000 persons never smokers are diagnosed with lung cancer each year just in United States. Since lung cancer five year survival rates, more and more never-smokers die of lung cancer than do patients of leukemia, ovarian cancer, or AIDS.

Main article - Lung Cancer Causes