Cigarette smoking increases the risk of skin cancer

Smoking increases the risk of various cancers. And were all ten forms of cancer known to be caused by harmful substances from tobacco smoke. There is now another one with skin cancer.

Smoking increases, as is known, your risk of lung cancer. And also a lot: about ninety percent of all cases of lung cancer is the direct result of the habit of regular cigarette, cigar or sjekkie to stabbing. But smoking can also cause many other cancers. Namely, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, esophageal cancer, tumors in the mouth and throat, pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer, cervical cancer and acute myeloid leukemia. To those not already very modest list can now be added another one: skin cancer.

In the journal Archives of Dermatology this week is a meta-study of the relationship between smoking and various types of skin cancer. With such a meta-study looks at research into a subject so far been published, whichever is scientifically sufficient quality, and then the results of all previously published studies on lumped together and analyzed again.

According to the meta-study conducted by the British medical researcher Jo Leonardi-Bee, and two colleagues, smoking increases the risk of a specific type of skin cancer called squamous cell carcinoma. This is a relatively common form of cancer in the Netherlands, about one in four thousand people got to do. Regularly sucking on a cigarette like your chances this form of skin cancer by about 52 percent. That makes smoke, you risk squamous cell carcinoma, it is roughly as dangerous as the UV light to which you exposed if you regularly in the sun is baking. For other types of skin cancer was found no link with smoking.

Nevertheless there are some things to criticize in this study. Leonardi-Bee As already pointed out, and in an accompanying commentary in the same journal we read, the conclusion that smoking can cause squamous cell carcinoma is ultimately based on only six independent studies. The other scientific studies on this phenomenon were not strong enough to sit together to take in the meta-study.

What weather certainly does not mean that the conclusion of the study now published nonsense. As crazy is the idea that smoking can cause skin cancer finally not. You inhale the smoke of cigarettes while in, so your lungs are most at risk. But the carcinogens from the smoke is coming in part through your lungs into your bloodstream. After your blood these chemicals to various corners of your body. Hence the chance of smoking all the other types mentioned cancer, in organs not directly exposed to the smoke.