- "The only way of finding the
limits of the possible
- is by going beyond them into the
impossible."
-
-
-
Arthur C. Clarke
Smoking: The Top Preventable Cause of Cancer Deaths
In the year 2000, about 1.4 million cancer deaths, or more than one in
every five cancer deaths worldwide, were caused by smoking, "making it
possibly the single largest preventable cause of cancer death," Dr.
Majid Ezzati from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston told Reuters
Health.
Smoking is widely
recognized as a major cause of cancer; but there is little information
on how it contributes to the global and regional burden of cancers in
combination with other risk factors that affect background cancer
mortality patterns, Ezzati and colleagues point out in the latest issue
of the International Journal of Cancer.
To estimate
site-specific cancer deaths caused by smoking in the year 2000, they
analyzed data from two unique data sources -- the American Cancer
Society's Cancer Prevention Study II and the World Health Organization
and International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cancer mortality
databases.
There were an estimated
1.42 million cancer deaths worldwide in 2000. Twenty-one percent of
total global cancer deaths were attributed to smoking.
Of these, 1.18 million
were among men and 0.24 million among women. "The proportion of cancer
deaths caused by smoking is more than 40 percent for men in many regions
of the world like North America and Europe," Ezzati said.
A total of 625,000
smoking-caused cancer deaths occurred in the developing world and
794,000 in industrialized regions.
Right now, there are
slightly more cancer deaths caused by smoking in the industrialized
countries of North America, Europe, and Western Pacific, Ezzati
observed, "but the rise in smoking in the developing world in the past
two to three decades is expected to shift the burden to the developing
world."
Lung cancer is by far
the most noticeable cancer caused by smoking with about 850,000 or 71
percent of all lung cancer deaths caused by smoking. The next important
cancers in terms of number of deaths caused by smoking are the cancers
of the upper aerodigestive tract (mouth, oropharynx, and esophagus).
These estimates of
smoking-attributable cancer mortality "provide an important baseline"
for evaluating how tobacco control programs may contribute to reducing
the global and regional burden of cancers, the investigators conclude.
SOURCE:
International Journal of Cancer, October 10, 2005
and worldhealth.net
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