Jump to full article: PR Newswire, 2009-06-05
Author: SOURCE West Virginia University Health Sciences Center
Intro: It's common knowledge that smoking raises risks of lung cancer. And yet researchers haven't known whether continued smoking by lung cancer patients would increase the risk of the cancer's spread.
Researchers at West Virginia University - studying the relationship between death rates from lung cancer and how much a person smoked - have found that smoking intensity in fact predicts how the disease will progress.
Patients who smoked two packs a day had a 58 percent higher risk of their lung cancers returning or spreading compared with nonsmoking patients.
Smoking intensity is one of only two factors found to predict lung-cancer mortality, according to the study published in the May issue of the journal Lung Cancer. The other factor is the stage of the cancer when diagnosed. Almost 350 patients with non-small cell lung cancer were studied.
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