The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 274 No 7335 p139
5 February 2005

This article
Reprint   Photocopy

  Acrobat Reader

News summary

Related websites
No Smoking (links)

Childhood smoke exposure linked to adult lung cancer

Frequent exposure to environmental tobacco smoke during childhood is associated with lung cancer in adulthood, a long-term, prospective study published on BMJ Online First has shown. “To our knowledge, ours is the first prospective study to report such association,” the authors comment.

The study, which collected information on exposure to environmental tobacco smoke from 123,479 participants, also found that the risk of lung cancer was higher among former smokers who had not smoked for at least 10 years than among those who had never smoked. The authors suggest that this may be because former smokers already have mutations in their cells and so are more susceptible to low level exposure to environmental tobacco smoke.