Cigarettes and Lung Cancer

Title

Creator

Miller, Lois

Language

English

Source

Panorama XII (8) August 1960

Subject

Smoking -- Health aspects

Cigarettes

Lungs -- Cancer

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

Smoke Unlimited By Lois Mattox Miller Over the past five years the American public has be come increasingly aware of and concerned over the rapid ly increasing number of deaths from lung cancer and the appa rent relationship of this disease to cigarette smoking. In work ing with my husband, Senior Editor James Monahan, on the Reader’s Digest TobaccoHealth articles, we have seen important developments which, although by no means solving the problem, do present distinct possibilities for reducing the risk of lung cancer. The first major development was the publication in The Jour nal of the American Medical Association of August, 1954 of the preliminary report of the Hammond-Horn study for the American Cancer Society which indicated, from a broad statisti cal basis, an association between cigarette smoking and high death rates, particularly in lung cancer. This association be tween cigarette smoking and lung cancer was further estab lished and a cause and effect relationship indicated by the Society’s final report on the mass survey of the smoking ha bits of nearly 200,000 men, pub lished in March, 1958. Some 28 August 1960 91 epidemiological studies done here and in seven countries ab road, over many years, confirm the cigarette-lung cancer asso ciation. This epidemiologic evidence of a cigarette-lung cancer rela tionship was supported, during the same period, by experimen tal, chemical, and pathologic evidence. Substances in ciga rette smoke were isolated and used to produce cancer in labo ratory animals. At least ten can cer-causing agents were identi fied in cigarette smoke, and two of these produced in experimen. tai animals lung cancer of the type commonly found among among cigarette smokers. Au topsy studies of men who had died from various diseases, in cluding lung damaged in pro portion to the number of ciga retes smoked. rToDAY, most scientists who have made the closest stu dy of the problem are convinc ed that cigarette smoking is the major cause—although not the only cause — of lung cancer. This opinion, however, is not unanimous. The high incidence of lung cancer in certain indus tries, if employees are not pro tected from noxious fumes, im plicates air pollution as a pos sible cause of the disease. How ever, all the evidence makes it clear that cigarette smoking is largely responsible for the ten fold increase in lung cancer death rates since 1930. In order to determine wheth er popular filter brands decreas ed the tar and nicotine content of cigarette smoke, the Reader's Digest arranged studies by a well-known firm of consulting chemists. First tests made in 1957 re vealed that the majority of fil ter tips then on the market were mere mouth pieces; some filter tip brands gave the smoker more tar and nicotine than the plain tip brands manil'actured ed by the same companies. However, subsequent tests in 1958 and 1959 showed a big in crease in filtration efficiency and a much lower tar and nico tine content of the smoke. While the value of smokt filters is still undertermined, advise offered by many physicians can be sum med up thus: “If you are not now a smoker, do not acquire the habit. If you must smoke, smoke a pipe or cigars. If you smoke cigarettes, your best bet is to stop smoking. If you can’t break the habit, cut down on the number of cigarettes you smoke: the more cigarettes you smoke, the greater the risk. If you don’t cut down, switch to low-nicotine, low-tar cigarettes and keep your consumption of them at a minimum. Smokers will be wise if they have a chest x-ray at least once and better twice every year.” 92 Panorama

pages

91-92

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