Daily HealthBeat Tip

Smoking and breast cancer

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

It's not just lung cancer that smokers have to worry about. A study of older women finds they had a 30- to 40-percent greater risk of breast cancer if they smoked the equivalent of a pack a day for at least 11 years.

Researcher Christopher Li at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle saw this in women ages 65 to 79. But he says women who quit smoking got a payoff:

"Once women had, I think, been within 10 years of quitting, their risk of breast cancer was the same as that of a nonsmoker. So it does seem that there is this recency effect with smoking, that it was really only the current smokers that had an elevation in risk." (12 seconds)

The National Institutes of Health supported the work in the journal Cancer Causes and Control.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: November 17, 2005

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