LAHORE : Researchers have found that kidney canceris not only more common among heavy smokers, it also appears to be more aggressive.
According to a study, more than one in four smokers undergoingkidney cancer surgery had advanced stages of the disease, comparedto only one in five patients who didn't light up. Researchers say about 70 percent of people with early-stagetumors survive at least five years, whereas that number plummets tojust eight percent after the cancer has begun spreading. About one in 70 Americans, most of them elderly, develop kidneycancer, according to the American Cancer Society. But the findings aren't all bad news. Indeed, former smokerswho'd kicked the habit had a smaller chance of turning up withadvanced cancer. While the study wasn't designed to prove that quitting can slowtumor growth, Dr. Thomas J. Polascik, who led the work, said hebelieves that to be the case. "It can't bring you down to the risk of a nonsmoker, but it canget you almost there," Polascik, a surgeon at Duke University inDurham, North Carolina, told Reuters Health. His findings appear inthe Journal of Clinical Oncology. Polascik and his colleagues looked at data for 845 people who'dhad surgery for kidney cancer at their hospital. A quarter of thepatients had advanced disease, defined as cancer spreading beyondthe kidney. The odds of finding late-stage cancer were 60 percent higher insmokers -- about a fifth of the patients -- than non-smokers, evenafter taking age and other factors into account. And the morecigarettes they had smoked, the higher the odds. Former smokers also had higher odds of advanced disease. But theodds fell by nine percent for every decade they had been smoke-free. The researchers say that means smoking might not only up thechances the a tumor will form in the first place, but might alsofuel cancer growth, perhaps by suppressing the immune system.However, Alexander S. Parker, a kidney cancer expert at the MayoClinic in Jacksonville, Florida, said it's also possible thatsmokers are less likely to seek medical care than non-smokers. "If this is true, then it would not be the case that the biologyof these tumors is different," he told Reuters Health in an email."Rather, just that the individuals themselves have less contact withthe health care system and are less likely to be diagnosed whentheir cancers are at an early, treatable stage." Still, Parker, who was not involved in the new work, said thefindings lined up with earlier data showing that smokers have twicethe risk of developing kidney cancer, in addition to other healthproblems. "In the end," he said, "we need to be clear that smoking accountsfor hundreds of thousands of deaths every year in the U.S. andtherefore, the overall effort should still be focused on gettingpeople to quit smoking and to keep young people from starting in thefirst place." PPI