Lung Cancer link found between African Americans and lung disease
2008-09-13 06:31:22 (GMT) (Caymanmama.com - Health News News)
New Orleans, Louisiana (CaymanMama.com) — According to a recent report by Reuters Health, African Americans run a higher risk of developing lung cancer if they have a history of emphysema, chronic bronchitis or any other form of lung disease, as suggested by a new study conducted at the University of Texas.
The collection of lung diseases — called Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) — is most often triggered by smoking cigarettes and it is a known fact that those who develop COPD are more suseptible to developing cancerous tumors in the lungs. Researchers of the study found that of the 1,000 African Americans evaluated, COPD was a principal risk factor for lung cancer. In addition, African Americans with a family history of COPD were “more than six times as likely as those without the disease to develop lung cancer. This risk is on par with that linked to smoking, and is twice as high as the risk linked to COPD in whites, according to the researchers.”
The conclusions of the study were published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, and was an element of a “risk prediction model” the examiners created to more accurately predict lung cancer risk in African Americans. In the past, the majority of studies carried out to predict individual lung cancer risks were focused on the white adult population. In contrast, risk factors for lung cancer do not carry the same factors in all racial groups, the study suggested.
Lead researcher Dr. Carol Etzel, of the UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said in a written statement “The one size fits all risk prediction clearly does not work.” Etzel and her colleagues studied the assessments of 491 African Americans suffering from lung cancer and 497 cancer-free African Americans who were matched to the patients for age and sex.
Not surprisingly, smoking was the largest and most common risk factor for the development of lung cancer was strongly linked to black adults as much as it was for white adults. Adults who are smoked currently “were more than six times as likely as non-smokers to develop lung cancer, and former smokers had a more than three-fold increase in their risk.”
Etzel and her colleagues hope that the studies will help doctors encourage patients to take all necessary precautions to prevent lung disease and to keep those cigarettes as far away as possible.
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