6 ms·

We may finally know why so many lifelong smokers never get lung cancer

40 points by HiroProtagonist 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
incomingpain 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pydry 4y ago
  >If you look up lung cancer graphs. You'll find most of them unexplicably cut off around 2006-2011. Conspiracy? Conspiracy or a lagging indicator of reduced cigarette consumption?
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >Conspiracy or a lagging indicator of reduced cigarette consumption? The graph I linked has a lagging indicator factor to be sure. Tobacco consumption from 1970s to today has dropped for obvious reasons. Lung cancer dropped from 1990s to 2006 or so in a highly correlative rate to tobacco consumption. Which is great news! But suddenly since 2006 lung cancer rates have dramatically increased. It's now above the lung cancer peak in the 1990s. The conspiracy mainly being they dont show you the huge increase since 2006 and keep their graphs clean. The allegation that tobacco toxicity kept lung cancer in balance is possible but certainly unproven. Instead what my other link tried to show is that perhaps tobacco use isn't the boogeyman and hell you probably noticed governments have given up on the anti-tobacco game. We now know what's causing it but what's the consequences to society if we published? Oh man I could see the collapse of society so quick.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yakak 4y ago
      VW was caught faking Diesel safety starting somewhere around 2006-2008 (it would be interesting to see the roll out.) So rise in small particulates causing any and all respiratory problems does not have to correlate to smoking.
    - manwe150 4y ago
      I don't quite follow your logic in the various threads here. It seems that you are attempting to make the claim that since some cases don't follow the trend (smoking can lead to a reduction in cancer for some people), therefore the statistics overall must have been wrong (smoking leads to increased rates of cancer). But that does not follow logically or mathematically. In this study, they were looking at the conditional probabilities of what is unique about people who were non-cancerous. Since in this study they excluded people with cancer, we cannot make any claim about expected lung cancer rates, since they excluded that data up-front. As for the other claims, I haven't done any research, but it sounds vaguely like Simpson's paradox could be starting to dominate the graphs, so they stopped publishing them. (i.e. there are other confounding variables that now dominate, so it is not worth the research time and money to continue collecting that data specifically for smoking rather than looking for new causes)
- sparsely 4y ago
  what a journey, and then that final twist at the end! :chefs-kiss:
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >what a journey, and then that final twist at the end! :chefs-kiss: Here's the followup. If we have a cure for cancer. We have some workable options for anti-dementia. I don't believe in mrna technology but we probably have effective anti-viral treatments very soon. We also might have anti-aging drugs like metformin and others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9P1xuIJGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9P1xuIJGg What's about to happen to the world population? Life expectancy is probably going to increase dramatically. Countries like China, Russia, Balkans, Japan who have serious population decline problems MUST go down these paths. Keep people alive as much as possible. Zerocovid is about minimizing population decline. Then also what happens to retirement? You get a country like India where 60% of people don't work. Can the 40% of the population really work to keep the 60% of people sitting at home? Retirement is a pyramid scheme. More people have to pay into it then receive. If people are about to live to 150 years old. Is retirement still 65?
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      > Retirement is a pyramid scheme. More people have to pay into it then receive. If people are about to live to 150 years old. Is retirement still 65? It depends on where you live. There are countries with capitalization systems instead of repartition systems. The most common one in the future will probably be a mix?
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      > I don't believe in mrna technology. That it exists, that it is effective, that the pros outweigh the cons?
      - sedivy94 4y ago
        I’m inferring that OP means they don’t believe in the extrapolated utility of mRNA treatments over time. It’s an exciting technology but COVID vaccines showed us one of its limitations (at least within the context of the disease, its formulation, and vector).
- koningrobot 4y ago
  According to https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ the rate is still going down. Literally the first place I looked and their graph goes to 2018.
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >According to https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ the rate is still going down. Literally the first place I looked and their graph goes to 2018. 2006, 1.5 million new cancer cases. 2017, 1.7 million new cancer cases. The data certainly exists. I wasn't inferring that it doesn't exist. Obviously this is all cancers and us centric. Obviously there's some hiding of facts here as well. Not apples to apples comparison to the subject at hand. Please also don't take me as arguing for the return of tobacco or encouraging tobacco use at all. The point I am making... we now know what causes cancer and it's beyond controversial. To the point that public health would rather people have cancer. Let that sink in.
    - whatisthiseven 4y ago
      Yea, because the US population is aging rapidly past 60, when most cancers start to form. Your premise could easily be explained by "the percentage of the American population over 60 has increased steadily." See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-population-in-the-total-us-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-... So yea, more total cancers diagnosed, cause old people get cancer.
  - whatisthiseven 4y ago
    That link just shows all cancer. If you start here: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/index.htm Then click the graph on the right, you can see the trend line for LUNG cancer specifically. Spoilers: the per capita lung cancer incidence is going down for all of the 21st century. It is actually improving faster the most recent decade than the previous. What has changed is the total number of new lung cancer cases is slightly increasing. This is easily explained by an increasingly elderly population, which makes up over 80% of lung cancer sufferers: https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/lung-cancer/resource-library/lung-cancer-fact-sheet https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-looku...
- SmileyJames 4y ago
  nih.org
- Gatsky 4y ago
  Why think when you can just have paranoid fever dreams instead. > It's also not a paradox for why many lifetime smokers never get cancer while non-smokers are now more commonly the ones with lung cancer. This is simply wrong.
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >Why think when you can just have paranoid fever dreams instead. Your insults toward me win. I have been flagged on my post and unable to post on HN. If I can reply again I will. >This is simply wrong. I'm here for conversation. I'm nobody from nobodyville; dont have cancer and never smoked. If you have points to make like others are doing, then hell ya. Telling me I'm wrong without explaining how im dumb doesn't really help me be less dumb. So quick breakdown. In the 1990s when we had peak lung cancer. It was something like 3% of lung cancer folks were non-smokers. 97% is quite significant to say smoking = lung cancer. In 2006-2010 it rose to about 20% were non-smokers or at least didn't admit to smoking or having an occupational reason. General thought was just exposure in history and forgot. Perhaps second hand smoke? Nobody yet saw any real data suggesting any problem with this. Right before covid, it was over 50% were non-smokers and no occupational reasons. There was big research in Canada to evaluate radon but that came up false. Cancer clusters would seem like a radon relation but evidently not. There is a positive correlation between diesel exhaust but certainly not explanatory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust A known bigger issue is causing cancer and we need to address this. Not continue pretending like it's just smokers or old people. I guess that's the plan though? Having figured out this flag worthy controversial reason I do understand why they make this decision. It is and isn't a conspiracy. They are choosing probably the right decision. I'll just leave these here because I can't reply to anyone else. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34483925/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34483925/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835698/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835698/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32971268/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32971268/ Hell ya Mexico and China!
    - edmundsauto 4y ago
      A couple of data points. It looks like 20% is only in women - in men, it's 9%. Second, the ratio of smokers:nonsmokers can be at least partially explained by the number of smokers decreasing. Third, it's not clear whether this is a real change, or if it's a data anomaly. Personally, I would be very careful about the confidence with which I express this perspective. It might be true, but it's not at all clear that it is, so it's not clear there is a mystery. “It is well-documented that approximately 20% of lung cancer cases that occur in women in the U.S. and 9% of cases in men, are diagnosed in never-smokers,” "To a great extent, this is a function of straightforward math... Fewer people smoke today than in previous decades... because there are fewer smokers in the population, out of every 100 lung cancer patients, fewer will therefore be smokers. And that means more of them will be never-smokers." "There are also hints that the absolute incidence of lung cancer in never-smokers has been rising, said oncologist John Heymach of MD Anderson Cancer Center. Some data say it has, but other data say no. The stumbling block is that old datasets often don’t indicate a lung cancer patient’s smoking status, Heymach said, making it impossible to calculate what percent of never-smokers in past decades developed lung cancer." https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-cancer-turning-up-in-never-smokers/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIt%20is%20well%2Ddocumented%20that,of%20the%20American%20Cancer%20Society https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-ca....
tabtab 4y ago
A new sub-species is evolving: Homo Smokus
Maursault 4y ago
Tobacco use does not cause cancer, neither does smoking. What is causing smokers to die en masse since the 1950's is what the industry innocuously calls "additives." The additives are over 300 known carcinogens intentionally added to nearly all brands of cigarettes in order to increase the addictiveness of nicotine. What is in those cigarettes could only very charitably be called half tobacco. It's the other half that is killing people, and it seems absurd when the gov't beat Big Tobacco in the 1990's, that this practice of adding death to cigarettes was not made illegal. Big Tobacco paid about half the settlement, and the rest was (for unknown reasons) forgiven in the early 2000s.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Smoking creates carcinogens. Burning creates a bunch of semi oxidized particulates, of which many are harmful.
- mingus88 4y ago
  You're going to need to source this "smoking does not cause cancer" claim because evidence is increasingly mounting that even non-tobacco related smoke is linked to higher rates of cancer https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00067-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... https://www.camfil.com/en-us/insights/air-quality/air-pollution-and-cancer-mortality-risks https://www.camfil.com/en-us/insights/air-quality/air-pollut...
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Bear in mind, pipe smokers use natural tobacco, without additives: No. 1103, p.112 [1] >Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years. No. 1103, page 92 [1] > Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers. ...which means pipe smokers who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers. Cancer rates for smokers skyrocketed after the 1950s chemical revolution. Previously, it was not so. What causes smokers to get cancer is the added carcinogens, not the tobacco. Granted, smoking anything is not healthy. Smoking causes emphysema and a host of other health issues. My only point is that what causes smokers to get lung cancer is obviously the added carcinogens. [1] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
xchip 4y ago
TL;DR That’s because their DNA is able to repair the body before the cell mutations develop into tumors. These DNA repair genes can be inherited or acquired, scientists say. And exactly what makes one person’s body better at repairing DNA is still a mystery.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

incomingpain 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pydry 4y ago
>If you look up lung cancer graphs. You'll find most of them unexplicably cut off around 2006-2011. Conspiracy? Conspiracy or a lagging indicator of reduced cigarette consumption?
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >Conspiracy or a lagging indicator of reduced cigarette consumption? The graph I linked has a lagging indicator factor to be sure. Tobacco consumption from 1970s to today has dropped for obvious reasons. Lung cancer dropped from 1990s to 2006 or so in a highly correlative rate to tobacco consumption. Which is great news! But suddenly since 2006 lung cancer rates have dramatically increased. It's now above the lung cancer peak in the 1990s. The conspiracy mainly being they dont show you the huge increase since 2006 and keep their graphs clean. The allegation that tobacco toxicity kept lung cancer in balance is possible but certainly unproven. Instead what my other link tried to show is that perhaps tobacco use isn't the boogeyman and hell you probably noticed governments have given up on the anti-tobacco game. We now know what's causing it but what's the consequences to society if we published? Oh man I could see the collapse of society so quick.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yakak 4y ago
    VW was caught faking Diesel safety starting somewhere around 2006-2008 (it would be interesting to see the roll out.) So rise in small particulates causing any and all respiratory problems does not have to correlate to smoking.
  - manwe150 4y ago
    I don't quite follow your logic in the various threads here. It seems that you are attempting to make the claim that since some cases don't follow the trend (smoking can lead to a reduction in cancer for some people), therefore the statistics overall must have been wrong (smoking leads to increased rates of cancer). But that does not follow logically or mathematically. In this study, they were looking at the conditional probabilities of what is unique about people who were non-cancerous. Since in this study they excluded people with cancer, we cannot make any claim about expected lung cancer rates, since they excluded that data up-front. As for the other claims, I haven't done any research, but it sounds vaguely like Simpson's paradox could be starting to dominate the graphs, so they stopped publishing them. (i.e. there are other confounding variables that now dominate, so it is not worth the research time and money to continue collecting that data specifically for smoking rather than looking for new causes)
sparsely 4y ago
what a journey, and then that final twist at the end! :chefs-kiss:
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >what a journey, and then that final twist at the end! :chefs-kiss: Here's the followup. If we have a cure for cancer. We have some workable options for anti-dementia. I don't believe in mrna technology but we probably have effective anti-viral treatments very soon. We also might have anti-aging drugs like metformin and others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9P1xuIJGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9P1xuIJGg What's about to happen to the world population? Life expectancy is probably going to increase dramatically. Countries like China, Russia, Balkans, Japan who have serious population decline problems MUST go down these paths. Keep people alive as much as possible. Zerocovid is about minimizing population decline. Then also what happens to retirement? You get a country like India where 60% of people don't work. Can the 40% of the population really work to keep the 60% of people sitting at home? Retirement is a pyramid scheme. More people have to pay into it then receive. If people are about to live to 150 years old. Is retirement still 65?
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    > Retirement is a pyramid scheme. More people have to pay into it then receive. If people are about to live to 150 years old. Is retirement still 65? It depends on where you live. There are countries with capitalization systems instead of repartition systems. The most common one in the future will probably be a mix?
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    > I don't believe in mrna technology. That it exists, that it is effective, that the pros outweigh the cons?
    - sedivy94 4y ago
      I’m inferring that OP means they don’t believe in the extrapolated utility of mRNA treatments over time. It’s an exciting technology but COVID vaccines showed us one of its limitations (at least within the context of the disease, its formulation, and vector).
koningrobot 4y ago
According to https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ the rate is still going down. Literally the first place I looked and their graph goes to 2018.
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >According to https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ the rate is still going down. Literally the first place I looked and their graph goes to 2018. 2006, 1.5 million new cancer cases. 2017, 1.7 million new cancer cases. The data certainly exists. I wasn't inferring that it doesn't exist. Obviously this is all cancers and us centric. Obviously there's some hiding of facts here as well. Not apples to apples comparison to the subject at hand. Please also don't take me as arguing for the return of tobacco or encouraging tobacco use at all. The point I am making... we now know what causes cancer and it's beyond controversial. To the point that public health would rather people have cancer. Let that sink in.
  - whatisthiseven 4y ago
    Yea, because the US population is aging rapidly past 60, when most cancers start to form. Your premise could easily be explained by "the percentage of the American population over 60 has increased steadily." See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-population-in-the-total-us-population/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-... So yea, more total cancers diagnosed, cause old people get cancer.
- whatisthiseven 4y ago
  That link just shows all cancer. If you start here: https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/index.htm Then click the graph on the right, you can see the trend line for LUNG cancer specifically. Spoilers: the per capita lung cancer incidence is going down for all of the 21st century. It is actually improving faster the most recent decade than the previous. What has changed is the total number of new lung cancer cases is slightly increasing. This is easily explained by an increasingly elderly population, which makes up over 80% of lung cancer sufferers: https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/lung-cancer/resource-library/lung-cancer-fact-sheet https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-looku...
SmileyJames 4y ago
nih.org
Gatsky 4y ago
Why think when you can just have paranoid fever dreams instead. > It's also not a paradox for why many lifetime smokers never get cancer while non-smokers are now more commonly the ones with lung cancer. This is simply wrong.
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >Why think when you can just have paranoid fever dreams instead. Your insults toward me win. I have been flagged on my post and unable to post on HN. If I can reply again I will. >This is simply wrong. I'm here for conversation. I'm nobody from nobodyville; dont have cancer and never smoked. If you have points to make like others are doing, then hell ya. Telling me I'm wrong without explaining how im dumb doesn't really help me be less dumb. So quick breakdown. In the 1990s when we had peak lung cancer. It was something like 3% of lung cancer folks were non-smokers. 97% is quite significant to say smoking = lung cancer. In 2006-2010 it rose to about 20% were non-smokers or at least didn't admit to smoking or having an occupational reason. General thought was just exposure in history and forgot. Perhaps second hand smoke? Nobody yet saw any real data suggesting any problem with this. Right before covid, it was over 50% were non-smokers and no occupational reasons. There was big research in Canada to evaluate radon but that came up false. Cancer clusters would seem like a radon relation but evidently not. There is a positive correlation between diesel exhaust but certainly not explanatory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_exhaust A known bigger issue is causing cancer and we need to address this. Not continue pretending like it's just smokers or old people. I guess that's the plan though? Having figured out this flag worthy controversial reason I do understand why they make this decision. It is and isn't a conspiracy. They are choosing probably the right decision. I'll just leave these here because I can't reply to anyone else. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34483925/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34483925/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835698/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5835698/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32971268/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32971268/ Hell ya Mexico and China!
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    A couple of data points. It looks like 20% is only in women - in men, it's 9%. Second, the ratio of smokers:nonsmokers can be at least partially explained by the number of smokers decreasing. Third, it's not clear whether this is a real change, or if it's a data anomaly. Personally, I would be very careful about the confidence with which I express this perspective. It might be true, but it's not at all clear that it is, so it's not clear there is a mystery. “It is well-documented that approximately 20% of lung cancer cases that occur in women in the U.S. and 9% of cases in men, are diagnosed in never-smokers,” "To a great extent, this is a function of straightforward math... Fewer people smoke today than in previous decades... because there are fewer smokers in the population, out of every 100 lung cancer patients, fewer will therefore be smokers. And that means more of them will be never-smokers." "There are also hints that the absolute incidence of lung cancer in never-smokers has been rising, said oncologist John Heymach of MD Anderson Cancer Center. Some data say it has, but other data say no. The stumbling block is that old datasets often don’t indicate a lung cancer patient’s smoking status, Heymach said, making it impossible to calculate what percent of never-smokers in past decades developed lung cancer." https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-cancer-turning-up-in-never-smokers/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIt%20is%20well%2Ddocumented%20that,of%20the%20American%20Cancer%20Society https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/26/growing-share-of-lung-ca....

tabtab 4y ago

A new sub-species is evolving: Homo Smokus

Maursault 4y ago

Tobacco use does not cause cancer, neither does smoking. What is causing smokers to die en masse since the 1950's is what the industry innocuously calls "additives." The additives are over 300 known carcinogens intentionally added to nearly all brands of cigarettes in order to increase the addictiveness of nicotine. What is in those cigarettes could only very charitably be called half tobacco. It's the other half that is killing people, and it seems absurd when the gov't beat Big Tobacco in the 1990's, that this practice of adding death to cigarettes was not made illegal. Big Tobacco paid about half the settlement, and the rest was (for unknown reasons) forgiven in the early 2000s.

thehappypm 4y ago
Smoking creates carcinogens. Burning creates a bunch of semi oxidized particulates, of which many are harmful.
mingus88 4y ago
You're going to need to source this "smoking does not cause cancer" claim because evidence is increasingly mounting that even non-tobacco related smoke is linked to higher rates of cancer https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00067-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... https://www.camfil.com/en-us/insights/air-quality/air-pollution-and-cancer-mortality-risks https://www.camfil.com/en-us/insights/air-quality/air-pollut...
- Maursault 4y ago
  Bear in mind, pipe smokers use natural tobacco, without additives: No. 1103, p.112 [1] >Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years. No. 1103, page 92 [1] > Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers. ...which means pipe smokers who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers. Cancer rates for smokers skyrocketed after the 1950s chemical revolution. Previously, it was not so. What causes smokers to get cancer is the added carcinogens, not the tobacco. Granted, smoking anything is not healthy. Smoking causes emphysema and a host of other health issues. My only point is that what causes smokers to get lung cancer is obviously the added carcinogens. [1] https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf

xchip 4y ago

TL;DR That’s because their DNA is able to repair the body before the cell mutations develop into tumors. These DNA repair genes can be inherited or acquired, scientists say. And exactly what makes one person’s body better at repairing DNA is still a mystery.