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Families inherit likelihood of smoking cancers

Respiratory Care Weekly, April 5, 2006

It seems that everyone knows someone who smoked all his life and died at a ripe old age, cancer-free and relatively unscathed, health-wise. Yet RTs see the ravages of lifelong smoking habits every day in their work with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer patients. How does that happen? Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center presented a study this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Washington, DC, that showed that smoking cancer risk seems to be genetic-some families are more predisposed to developing it.

The study looked at 2,465 first-degree relatives (i.e., parents, children, siblings) of 316 nonsmokers with lung cancer, compared to 2,442 first-degree relatives of 318 nonsmokers without lung cancer. They found that among cancer families the relatives carried a 25% higher risk of developing lung cancer. When relatives of the cancer victims developed lung cancer it was typically 10 years before those in the noncancer group did, and mothers in the cancer group also carried twice the risk of developing breast cancer, according to the study.

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