According to a scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, some smokers may have robust mechanisms that protect them from lung cancer by limiting mutations.
It is widely known that cigarette smoking is the major cause of lung cancer, yet only a minority of smokers develop the disease. Simon Spivack, M.D., M.P.H., a co-senior author of the study, professor of medicine, of epidemiology & population health, and of genetics at Einstein, and a pulmonologist at Montefiore Health System also said as thus:
“This may prove to be an important step toward the prevention and early detection of lung cancer risk and away from the current herculean efforts needed to battle late-stage disease, where the majority of health expenditures and misery occur,”
The Einstein researchers used SCMDA to compare the mutational landscape of normal lung epithelial cells that is, cells lining the lung from two types of people: 14 never-smokers, ages 11 to 86; and 19 smokers, ages 44 to 81, who had smoked a maximum of 116 pack years.
According to them, One pack year of smoking equals 1 pack of cigarettes smoked per day for one year. The cells were collected from patients who were undergoing bronchoscopy for diagnostic tests unrelated to cancer.
The researchers found that mutations are accumulated in the lung cells of non-smokers as they age and so more mutations were found in the lung cells of the smokers.
As Dr. Spivack said “This experimentally confirms that smoking increases lung cancer risk by increasing the frequency of mutations, as previously hypothesized,” “This is likely one reason why so few non-smokers get lung cancer, while 10% to 20% of lifelong smokers do.”
From their findings, the number of cell mutations found in lung cells increased in a straight line with the number of pack years of smoking therefore, the risk for lung cancer increased as well. However, the rise in cell mutations halted after 23 pack years of exposure.
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