Female Smokers May Face Greater Risk Than Men.

2001 APR 19 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Cigarette for cigarette, smoking appears to pack a bigger punch for women than men when it comes to bladder cancer risk, according to a new study led by preventive medicine researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

As a whole, cigarette smokers were found to run 2.5 times the risk of contracting bladder cancer than nonsmokers; but within this increased risk due to smoking, women appear to face an even greater risk than men, according to the report in the April 4, 2001, issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

"Our large, case-control study provides the first evidence, to our knowledge, that when comparable numbers of cigarettes are smoked, the risk of bladder cancer is higher in women than in men," said J. Esteban Castelao, researcher in preventive medicine and lead author of the study.

Castelao and colleagues at USC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted the epidemiological study among 1,514 patients with bladder cancer and 1,514 other comparable study participants in the Los Angeles area. Researchers asked about general smoking habits, how many cigarettes participants smoked and how often, as well as which types of cigarettes they smoked and how they inhaled (deeply, moderately, or lightly).

For both genders, the risk of bladder cancer appeared to rise both with the number of cigarettes smoked each day and with the number of years that participants had smoked regularly. In nearly every category of smoking, however, the risks to women were greater than those to men ("Gender- and smoking-related bladder cancer risk," JNCI, April 4, 2001;93(7)).