Smoking for more than 30 years and 20 packs, 54 times higher risk of small cell lung cancer...Genetic factors are low
May 18, 2025
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The National Health Insurance Corporation's Health Insurance Research Institute and Yonsei University's Graduate School of Health followed up with health examination and genetic risk score (PRS) data, cancer registration data, and health insurance qualification data of 136,965 examinees from 18 private screening centers nationwide between 2004 and 2013. PRS refers to the genetic risk for individual diseases calculated using genetic mutations and their genetic effects.
As a result, when the general characteristics of the study subjects, such as gender, age, and alcohol consumption, or the genetic risk scores of lung cancer and laryngeal cancer were the same, smokers with a greater risk of developing small cell lung cancer 54.49 times, squamous cell lung cancer 21.37 times, and squamous cell laryngeal cancer 8.30 times than non-smokers.
Under the condition that the general characteristics and smoking history of the study subjects were the same, the risk of carcinogenesis increased 1.20 to 1.26 times and 1.53 to 1.83 times for all lung and squamous cell lung cancers, respectively, when the genetic risk score was higher than when it was low (the top 20% of the genetic risk score).
This suggests that smoking periods contribute more significantly to cancer development than genetic factors.
The Health Insurance Corporation explained that the study is meaningful in that it re-provened the harmfulness of smoking, saying, `For the first time in Korea, genetic information was used to reveal that genetic factors had no or minimal effect on the occurrence of lung and laryngeal cancer.'
In addition, in the analysis of the risk of contributing to lung cancer and laryngeal cancer (the degree to which risk factors contribute to disease incidence in the exposed group), smoking contributed 98.2% to the occurrence of small cell lung cancer for smokers over 30 years and 20 pack years. The influence of genetic factors was minimal. The contribution of smoking to squamous cell laryngeal cancer and squamous cell lung cancer was also high at 88.0% and 86.2%, respectively.
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
