Smoking, bladder cancer, and women

by Mary Calvagna, MS

Bladder cancer is the sixth most common type of cancer, with more than 50,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Last year alone, more than 12,000 Americans died from bladder cancer.

Bladder cancer has often been thought of as a male disease, since men get bladder cancer three times more often than women. Bladder cancer has also been associated with cigarette smoking, as smoking is known to increase the risk.

Lung cancer is another cancer traditionally associated with men and cigarette smoking. But, research has shown that when smoking habits are comparable between men and women, women are at a higher risk for lung cancer. This fact led researchers at the University of Southern California Medical School to study possible sex differences in the susceptibility to bladder cancer among smokers. Their results were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers looked at more than 3,000 people. Half of them had bladder cancer and half did not. Their general smoking habits were studied—how often they smoked, how many cigarettes they smoked, and which type of cigarette they smoked. The researchers also collected blood samples, which they analyzed for chemicals from cigarette smoke.

For both men and women, cigarette smokers had more than a twofold increase in risk for contracting bladder cancer than non-smokers. And the risk appeared to increase with the number of cigarettes smoked each day and with the number of years a person smoked regularly.

This is not new information—science has already shown that smoking increases the risk of bladder cancer. What is new is that women appear to face an even greater risk than men in nearly every category of smoking. For example, a woman who smokes two or more packs of cigarettes a day has more than twice the risk of contracting bladder cancer than a man with the same smoking habits.

The authors of the study are not clear on why women are more adversely affected, but the study did confirm that quitting smoking reduces the risk of bladder cancer for both men and women. Due to the addictive nature of nicotine, smoking is a hard habit to break. To learn more about quitting, and get helpful hints and information, including a list of valuable resources, visit HealthGate's Smoking Cessation Center.