Cancer: Smoking Only Makes the Pain Worse

Most people no longer have doubts about the relationship between smoking and cancer, so researchers carried out a new study that focused on the effects of smoking on patients already suffering from cancer.

They concluded that cancer patients who keep smoking despite their condition, experience higher pain than nonsmokers.

Apparently, for several types of cancer and for cancers in stages I to IV, smoking caused severe pain, that eventually interfered with the patients' daily routine.

For their research, the scientists had 224 patients suffering from different cancers, report their own measures of pain severity, pain-related distress, and pain-related interference, as well as filling in a demographics questionnaire.

The severity of bodily pain was ranked from 1 (none) to 6 (very severe) and the degree to which this pain interfered with their daily activities – from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely).

People that kept on smoking experienced more serious pain than those that never smoked, and also reported more interference from pain in their daily routine than never smokers of former smokers did.

As for former smokers, the more years they had since they had quit smoking, the lighter the pain got.

Lead investigator Joseph W. Ditre, PhD, Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, said that in order “to elucidate important relations between pain and smoking among persons with cancer, and to identify prospective targets for intervention, it is necessary to build upon past findings by examining smoking status and pain reporting in greater detail, across a wider range of cancer patients, and with regard to potential benefits of quitting smoking.

“Specifically, we hypothesized that, among patients with diverse cancer diagnoses, current smokers would report greater pain, pain interference, and pain-related distress than former smokers and/or never smokers,” he explained.

“We also planned to examine associations between pain and other smoking variables (e.g., number of years since quitting) in an exploratory fashion.”

Lori Bastian, MD, Durham VA Medical Center and Department of Internal Medicine, at Duke University, wrote in an accompanying commentary that “clinicians must do more to assist cancer patients to quit smoking after their diagnosis.”

She added that “the major strength of this study is the diverse types of cancer and stage of disease,” and “although more research is needed to understand the mechanisms that relate nicotine to pain, physicians should aggressively promote smoking cessation among cancer patients.

“Preliminary findings suggest that smoking cessation will improve the overall treatment response and quality of life.”

The study is published in the January 2011 issue of Pain