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Apparently research has shown that each cigarette smoked can damage DNA; where build up of damage in the same cell is what leads to cancer. So your lungs can re

• koheripbal 7y ago
  I believe there are specific DNA errors that cause a cell to become cancerous. The effects are not cumulative. It's about statistics - the longer you smoke and the more you smoke, the more likely you will be to get cancer.
  • bitexploder 7y ago
    Yeah, it’s like playing cellular Russian roulette, as I understand it. The gun has a lot of empty chambers, but that one mutated cell they goes nuclear can be all it takes.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • JeremyNT 7y ago
    > It's about statistics - the longer you smoke and the more you smoke, the more likely you will be to get cancer. Exactly, a simple metric used is the "pack year"[0] which is a way to represent overall exposure. My mother died of lung cancer which sent me down many a rabbit hole, and I don't really understand what is surprising in the linked article. It's been known that risk of cancer decreases after one stops smoking, even if it never recedes to baseline (while asymptotically approaching it, basically). You have damaged cells which might become carcinogenic, or they might not, but those cells can also just die and be replaced by healthy cells. The more you've smoked, though, the more damaged cells you've caused, so the more land mines you've got floating around your body. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pack-year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pack-year