Smoker's race plays a role in lung cancer
Study findings could help tailor smoking cessation programs for specific racial and ethnic groups.
By Susan J. Landers, amednews staff. Feb. 13, 2006.
Washington -- New findings are adding to evidence that racial and ethnic differences matter when it comes to smoking and lung cancer.
A study in the Jan. 26 New England Journal of Medicine indicates that African-American and Native Hawaiian smokers face a significantly greater risk of lung cancer than do smokers who are white, Japanese-American or Hispanic.
Whites, in turn, have a greater risk than do Japanese-Americans and Hispanics, said study author Christopher Haiman, ScD, assistant professor in the Dept. of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The rates were similar for men and women.
A second study, in the January issue of Ethnicity and Disease, found that some of the already recognized ethnic and racial differences that underlie how adults' metabolize nicotine are also at work in teens.
The new studies add to an ongoing debate over genetics and race and their implications for medical care. The debate was advanced last summer with the approval of BiDil, the medication for heart failure, which had been found to be more effective among black patients than white.
"It is difficult to discuss the role of genetics in differences among groups, because of the fear that such discourse may reinforce notions of biologic determinism," noted Neil Risch, PhD, director of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of California, San Francisco, in an editorial on Dr. Haiman's study.
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