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Smoking’s In Your Genes
April 2, 2008
Love smoking? Blame your DNA. [AP]
Scientists say they have identified “a genetic link that makes people more likely to get hooked on tobacco, causing them to smoke more cigarettes, making it harder to quit, and leading more often to deadly lung cancer.”
The result comes from “three studies, funded by governments in the U.S. and Europe” that are “being published Thursday in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics.”
Here’s the bottom line: if you’re a smoker and you’ve got this genetic variation, it will “increase the risk of addiction and lung cancer.”
Caution: if you haven’t got this genetic variation, you’re not off the hook. If you smoke, you’re still “10 times more likely to get lung cancer than nonsmokers.” [BBC]
Nonsmokers with the genetic variation “might also have a slightly increased risk of developing lung cancer and similar problems.”
Identifying this genetic component to lung cancer and nicotine addiction will help scientists wean folks off their puffing habit and “lay the groundwork for more tailored quit-smoking treatments.”
Still, genetic variation or not, the best thing to do, according to just about everyone, is quit.
“It’s important to remember that the best thing a smoker can do to reduce their risk of lung cancer and a host of other life-threatening diseases is to quit,” says Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at British charity Cancer Research UK. [Nature]
Quit.
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