“In the past 30 years, the smoking rate in public places in my country has been declining, while the incidence of lung cancer has increased by more than four times”
Academician Zhong Nanshan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering has always vigorously advocated smoking control and cessation, but found that It is a strange phenomenon that although the smoking rate in China has dropped, the incidence of lung cancer has increased significantly. It is said that smoking is harmful to health, is it wrong that smoking causes cancer?
In the past 10 to 30 years, the smoking rate has continued to decline, but the incidence of lung cancer has quadrupled
< p>The “China Smoking Harmful Health Report 2020” shows that the smoking rate of people aged ≥15 years in my country has dropped from 33.9% in 1984 to 26.6% in 2018. Specifically, the smoking rate of males has increased from 61% % dropped to 50.5%, and the smoking rate among women dropped from 7% to 2.1%.
In the past 30 years, the smoking rate in my country has continued to decline, but the incidence of lung cancer has risen by more than 400%. my country is the country with the largest number of lung cancers in the world. According to the “Global Burden of Cancer” report published by WHO, there are about 820,000 new lung cancer cases and about 710,000 deaths in my country, and the mortality rate is close to 87%, ranking first in the world.
The smoking rate has decreased, but the incidence of lung cancer has continued to rise. Does this mean that there is no direct causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer? It is a wrong view that smoking cessation can protect lung health. ? Follow Xiao Ai to learn more about it.
Second, the question is, is it wrong that smoking causes cancer? 1. The smoking rate has decreased, but the number of smokers is the largest.
The smoking rate in China has decreased, but the effect of tobacco control is not ideal at all. In 2021, the Lancet published a study that modeled smoking-related indicators from 3,625 nationally representative surveys, cost-effective by age and gender. Tobacco use rates and attributable disease burden from 1990 to 2019 in 204 countries and regions were used to assess the impact of smoking on health.
The results showed that China ranks first in the world in terms of both the number of smokers and tobacco consumption. In 2019, there were approximately 341 million smokers in China, accounting for 30% of the global smoking population. Due to its huge population, China ranks first in the world in the number of deaths due to smoking and its absolute increase. 2. Smoking causes cancer, there is sufficient evidence
He Jie, president of Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, said that there were about 730,000 new cases of lung cancer in my country in 2015 , about 600,000 deaths, of which 42.1% were attributed to smoking.
A study published in the journal Science found that smoking a pack a day for a year caused 150 mutations in normal lung cells
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In addition, smoking can also lead to DNA damage and methylation. DNA damage can generally be repaired, but long-term repeated chronic stimulation is very harmful. Difficult to fix. It is also easy to evolve into deletions, mutations, and eventually induce cancer. DNA methylation is actually a manifestation of early cancer. Without timely intervention and treatment, cancer will continue to develop to the middle and late stages.
There is no doubt that smoking is harmful to health. Some people have conducted experiments on animals in an attempt to prove that smoking is harmless. What is the conclusion of the experiment? Then look down.
Third, in order to prove that smoking is harmless, some people did experiments with dogs…
In 1951, the British Tobacco Company conducted an experiment to increase the company’s tobacco sales. conducted a “hound experiment”, in which they first selected 100 lively hounds and conducted the experiment after raising them for a period of time.
In the experiment, the dogs were allowed to smoke 100 cigarettes a day to observe the physical changes and lung characteristics after the tobacco entered the dogs’ lungs. In the end, tobacco companies claimed that tobacco was harmless to hounds. Even after smoking a lot of cigarettes, the hound was still alive and kicking.
At the time, people were very skeptical about this conclusion, but the tobacco companies’ experiments were too secretive to know the details. The turn of events came in 1974, when a female reporter went undercover at a tobacco company and investigated the experiment.
It turned out that this experiment was a complete lie, most of the hounds who conducted the experiment died during the experiment, and the survival time The longest survived for just over a month. In order to hide the truth, the tobacco company will replace a dog that dies in the experiment with a new one, which means that the hounds after the experiment are completely different from the first batch of participating dogs…
The claim that smoking is harmless is completely unconvincing, and long-term smokers have a significantly increased risk of lung cancer. In addition to smoking, some other factors may also lead to increased incidence of lung cancer. Fourth, the high incidence of lung cancer, in addition to smoking, there are several banes 1. Air pollution
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) will outdoor air pollution, In particular, particulate matter (PM) pollution is classified as a class 1 carcinogen for human lung cancer, and household burning coal is also classified as a class 1 carcinogen.
Studies have shown that long-term inhalation of these air, direct deposition of particulate matter in the air, and local action can cause oxidative damage and low-grade chronic inflammation, which in turn lead to the impact of DNA and gene transcription, while inhibiting cell apoptosis. These are the “accelerators” of the development of cancerous lesions.
2. Occupational diseases
In life, some people need to be exposed to uranium, radium and other radioactive substances and their derivatives, hydrocarbons, arsenic, and petroleum for a long time due to work factors. , asbestos, etc., these groups have a higher risk of lung cancer than ordinary people.
3. Don’t pay attention to some lung diseases
Some suffer from pulmonary tuberculosis, People with pneumoconiosis, silicosis, chronic lung inflammation, and pulmonary fibrotic scar lesions have a significantly increased risk of developing lung cancer without timely intervention and control.
4. Unbalanced diet
A survey conducted in New York and Chicago, USA showed that vitamin A, β-carotene and other substances in food have There was a negative correlation between intake and the incidence of cancer more than ten years later, the most prominent of which was lung cancer. Some people who lack vitamin A, β-carotene and other substances in their diets for a long time have a higher risk of developing lung cancer than people with balanced nutrition. It has been scientifically proven that smoking can lead to an increased risk of lung cancer. For smokers, the first thing to do to prevent the disease is to quit smoking. Don’t make excuses for not quitting smoking! Of course, this does not mean that smokers will develop lung cancer, and there are some smokers who never develop lung cancer in their entire lives, but we cannot be sure that we are the “lucky ones”, and it is better to quit smoking!
References:
[1] “The incidence of lung cancer has increased by more than 400% in the past 30 years, and the results of early screening of lung cancer in Shanghai’s six-year community are released: AI + prevention and treatment combined, Forces to make lung cancer into a chronic disease”. Wenhui Network. 2019.8.26
[2] “National Cancer Prevention and Control Awareness Week ⑥ | Which factors will lead to lung cancer”. Suining Central Hospital. 2020.4.20
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[3] “National Cancer Center: 1 in 4 cancer deaths is caused by smoking”. The Beijing News. 2019.11.21
[4] “Haze Weather” May be more likely to cause lung cancer than cigarettes”. Qianjiang Evening News