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Genes affect smoking behavior, lung cancer risk
A Bulgarian man smokes cigarette in a cafe in central Sofia, January 16, 2005.
Credit: Reuters/Stoyan Nenov
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Addicted to smoking and unable to quit? Your genes may be partly to blame, according to a trio of studies published Sunday in Nature Genetics that link several gene variants to a range of smoking habits, as well as increased risk for lung cancer.
Collectively, the researchers on the studies analyzed the DNA profiles of more than 140,000 people -- smokers and nonsmokers. They also studied whether genetic variants affect whether people start smoking, how much they smoke and whether they are able to quit.
In one study, researchers found that a single-letter change in the DNA code of chromosome 11 was strongly associated with taking up smoking and another on chromosome 9 was associated with quitting smoking. (Humans have 23 pair of chromosomes).
"This lends support to the idea that smoking is not just a question of will power alone, but that genetics plays a role in how much a person smokes and their ability to quit smoking," Dr. Helena Furberg from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was involved in the research, noted in an email to Reuters Health.
"We hope that our findings will help pave the way for better treatments that will help people quit smoking," said Furberg. She emphasized, however, that more research needs to be done before the findings will benefit people directly. "At this time, getting tested for these variants will not tell you anything meaningful about your risk of smoking or ability to quit smoking," the researcher noted.
In another study, a team of researchers led by scientists at deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, found that smokers who carry specific gene variants on chromosome 8 and 19 smoke more -- about half a cigarette extra each day -- and run a 10 percent higher risk of getting lung cancer compared to non-carriers.
The third study confirms and refines a discovery made two years ago by deCODE scientists and others of a gene variant on chromosome 15 associated with nicotine addiction and increased risk of lung cancer.
"These are fairly common variants," deCODE chairman and senior investigator Kari Stefansson told Reuters Health.
NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
"There is debate about the relative importance of nature (genes) versus nurture (environment) in the development of common diseases," Stefansson added. Studies have shown that while environment plays a key role in whether or not someone takes up smoking, genetics plays a role in whether or not they continue to smoke and how much.
"Our research shows that there is a genetic predisposition to become addicted to nicotine," Stefansson said.
Smoking causes 9 out of 10 cases of lung cancer, but only a small proportion of smokers actually develop the disease, further evidence, researchers say, that a person's genetic makeup is a factor.
"Smoking is bad for anyone's health, Stefansson noted in a written statement. "It is even worse for some, and today's discoveries continue to strengthen our ability to identify who those people are and give them a compelling reason to quit. We plan to incorporate these (variants) into our testing products to do that."
Nature Genetics, online April 25, 2010.
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http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/
In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
How? By identifying so-called “defective” family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior.
Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized — legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America’s most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich’s infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany’s program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.
At present most ex-smokers (70%)quit unassisted without “treatment” for what ultimately is a bad habit.
Providing smokers with this information is probably the best “treatment” that they need to quit, that they don’t need anyone else just a bit of balanced information, desire & a date.
I am running an awareness campaign month this October called the Quitober Challenge where employers are encouraged to support & sponsor their staff to quit in the workplace. Getting smokers to quit together uses the same forces that got smokers started in the first place, their social networks.
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