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Smoking increases risk of bowel cancer in women
– Reported, June 07, 2013
The large-scale study found that smoking increased the risk of bowel cancer in women by 19% compared with women who had never smoked. This was much larger than the (non-significant) 8% risk increase seen in male smokers.
Smoking is a recognised risk factor for bowel (colon) cancer and several other life-threatening diseases in both men and women. It is important to bear in mind that this research only looked at colon cancer. Whether there are gender differences in other smoking-related cancers, such as lung cancer, is uncertain based on the findings of this study alone.
The authors point out that their study did not take into account important risk factors known to be linked to bowel cancer, such as family history, diet, and alcohol consumption. If these had been accounted for the results may well have been different.
The study also didn’t produce any firm evidence to explain why there may be a difference in risk between women and men. Future research will need to address these limitations to see if the gender differences in risk still apply and, if so, why.
The initial symptoms of bowel cancer include:
Blood in your stools (faeces) or bleeding from your rectum
A change to your normal bowel habits that persists for more than three weeks, such as diarrhoea, constipation or passing stools more frequently than usual abdominal pain.
Unexplained weight loss
These are common symptoms that often indicate a less serious problem, such as haemorrhoids or poor diet, but you should contact your GP if you’ve had loose or bloody stools for three weeks or more.
The researchers reported how smoking is a recently established risk factor for what medical professionals refer to as colon cancer, or cancer of the large bowel. They explained that the levels of colon cancer in Norwegian women are unusually high when compared with similar countries.
In men, smoking levels peaked during the late 1950s, while in women levels did not peak until the 1970s. The fact that historically women smoked less but still had high levels of colon cancer could mean they were more vulnerable to the harmful effects of smoking in terms of colon cancer risk.
To test this, the researchers carried out a cohort study to see if women may be more susceptible to smoking-related colon cancer than men.
Female ever-smokers had a 19% increased risk of colon cancer compared with female never-smokers (hazard ratio [HR] 1.19, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.09 to 1.32). This was much larger than the non-significant 8% increased risk found between male ever-smokers compared with male never-smokers (HR 1.08, CI 0.97 to 1.19).
Women categorised in the groups who started smoking the earliest, smoked for longest, or smoked the most cigarettes per day were at more than 20% higher risk of colon cancer (range 28-48%) than women never-smokers.
The increase in risk was much larger for proximal colon cancer, with female ever-smokers more than 40% more at risk of developing the disease compared with female never-smokers.
CREDITS.
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