Smoking and cancer

Based on the American statistics; 1 out of every 5 consumers die each year which is an equivalent of about 438000 preventable deaths through out the United States. It is estimated that 38000 deaths are affiliated to second hand smoking each year. Further, 90% of deaths resulting to lungs cancer are among men while 80% of women die annually due to smoking. According to the latest records, 21000 people are diagnosed with cancer annually, where 85% of these individuals are believed to pass on within the next five years in line. Smoking and lung cancer are linked. The facts about what causes cancer in the lungs are no longer mysterious as they are well established in the scientific literature. It is now known that cigarette smoking is what causes lung cancer in 85-90% of all cases.

The carcinogenic effects of smoking cigarettes act on the tissue in the lungs over time and malignancies develop first in the bronchial tubes and then spread to the rest of the lungs. The term bronchogenic carcinoma simply refers to the fact that the cancer originates in the bronchial tissue.

History of Lung Cancer

The historical facts are pretty clear. Up until tobacco use became common in society cancer in the lungs was a pretty rare disease. The alarming epidemic of bronchogenic carcinoma followed on the heels of the tobacco industry manufacturing, selling, and distributing their cigarette product in the first half of the 1900's.

Up until this time some clinicians had noticed an increase in the number of cases, but mostly these were likely to be attributed to air pollution or industrial exposures to chemicals.

It was actually a German physician who made the original connection between smoking and lung cancer. He published a paper in 1929 that showed the connection and postulated that lung cancer is caused by smoking because almost all the patients who had the disease that he studied were smokers.

Of course in the first half of the 1900's nobody wanted to believe that the epidemic in cancer of the lung had anything to do with the harmful effects of smoking. In fact they did not even want to believe that smoking was harmful and wanted to continue to believe just what the tobacco manufacturers told them and that is that the effects of tobacco were relaxing and beneficial to the mind. People believed this because there were no facts to prove otherwise.

The real facts about smoking and lung cancer had yet to be established, although many clinicians were starting to become highly suspicious. By mid-century there was an alarming epidemic of bronchogenic carcinoma. The social acceptance of smoking among men and women and the increase in the numbers of smokers in society could not be a coincidence.