14 DAY TRIAL // By 2020, smoking will kill more persons than AIDS, tuberculosis, maternal mortality, car accidents, suicides and murder, as 35 % of the adults worldwide smoke. The risk for a smoker to find its end because of smoking is 50 %.
The habit has been connected to over 50 issues, over 25 being life-threatening, like heart attack, stroke, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and other lung diseases, but lung cancer is the most prominent. In pregnant women, smoking increases the risks of having a spontaneous abortion or give birth to a still child. Other problems also impact life quality, like impotence, sterility in both women and men, wrinkles, yellowed skin, digits and teeth, sagged breasts, bad breath, earlier age-related macular degeneration (blinding), taste and smell loss, skin diseases, coughing, accelerated breath or increased baldness.
Now add another nasty cancer: colorectal cancer (CRC). This is the result of a meta-analysis published in the journal Gastroenterology and carried out at the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy, based on 42 researches. Smoking increases the odds of this cancer by 2.14 times compared to never smokers and 1.47 for former compared to never smokers.
Ever smokers had a 13 % higher risk of polyps for each extra 10 years of smoking compared to never smokers. A daily pack of cigarettes for 50 years or two packs daily for 25 years doubled the probability for developing colorectal polyps compared to never smokers, pointing that 20 - 25 % of colorectal polyps could be caused by smoking. The risk was increased for high-risk polyps, which turn into cancer.
"While the harmful health effects of tobacco smoking are well known, smoking has not been considered so far in the stratification of patients for CRC screening. Our findings could support lowering the recommended age for smokers to receive colorectal cancer screening," said senior author Dr. Albert B. Lowenfels, from New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York.