HHS HealthBeat (October 31, 2011)

Not just the lungs

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

Smoking can lead to other diseases than lung cancer, and bladder cancer is among them. Researcher Neal Freedman of the National Institutes of Health looked at that risk in more than 186,000 women over about 10 years:

``Current-smoking women have four times the risk of bladder cancer as never-smoking women. We also found that 50 percent of bladder cancer could be attributed to cigarette smoking.’’  (9 seconds)

Freedman says women who quit dropped their risk to about two times that of never-smokers, but that it’s even better not to start.

Smoking was associated with a higher risk of bladder cancer than in previous studies. Freedman says this may be due to changes in the composition of cigarettes.

The study was in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

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

Last revised: October 31, 2011