Most of us may already know that smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing an average of 440,000 people annually. But not all of us know that women who smoke or used to smoke regularly are at a greater risk of dying from breast cancer. Those statistics come from a large prospective cohort study conducted by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, and presented at the Ninth Annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference. Between 1997 and 2000, the study enrolled 2,265 women from ethnically diverse backgrounds who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and after following them for an average of nine years, researchers found that women who currently smoke or who have smoked in the past had a 39 percent higher rate of dying from breast cancer after accounting for other prognostic variables.
If you had read our 2003 publication Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn’t Tell You, then you would have already been privy to this information, says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. Adds ACSH’s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan: “Even though smoking may not increase the actual risk of breast cancer, it increases the probability of death from the disease and expedites the progression of the cancer.”
The take home message? “Don’t smoke!” ACSH staffers exclaim.