I think even Fisher would be convinced [1].
[1] https://priceonomics.com/why-the-father-of-modern-statistics...
Other avenues could be:
- Smoking is also associated with other cancers, such as esophageal cancer and bladder cancer. Generally the warnings don't mention this however. By examining the mutation patterns in an esophageal cancer, you could relate it more conclusively to smoking, and could therefore claim you were not warned about that specific risk.
- Tissue samples from lung cancers diagnosed 20 or 30 years ago are sitting in archival storage. You could sequence the whole genome or exome of these tumours for about $1000 - $2000. Statute of limitations aside, sequencing these tumours could reveal the tobacco signature as a basis for a claim from a time when it was less clear or less public what the risks were.
- Passive smokers could have a case if their cancer shows a tobacco signature.
Seems pretty standard to me, and I would have to guess that this is the kind of lawsuit that you would probably support if the product in question was, say, red meat instead of tobacco.
Anal point - why the apostrophe? Should it be "Smoking becauses hundreds..."?
> "Had I known as a teenager that smoking caused mutations which would stay with me for life then I would never had started"
It agree with you that it's a little silly, especially for young people, but it wasn't that long ago they started forcing cancer warnings on tobacco.
> Smoking 'causes hundreds of DNA changes'
I'm guessing HN trimmed the closing quote to change it to:
> Smoking 'causes hundreds of DNA changes
It's now been changed to:
> Smoking “causes hundreds of DNA changes”
Those are weird quotes too, not the normal ". There are lots of different quote characters. :)
Pedants will probably like this magazine: http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/df/b7/74/dfb7741e5e84...
I doubt it, he would probably say no progress has been made at all:
"Many would still fell, as I did about five years ago, that a good prima facie case had been made for further investigation. None think that the matter is already settled. The further investigation seems, however, to have degenerated into the making of more confident exclamations, with the studied avoidance of the discussion of those alternative explanations of the facts which still await exclusion.
[...]
the B.B.C. gave me the opportunity of putting forward examples of the two classes of alternative theories which any statistical association, observed without the predictions of a definite experiment, allows—namely, (1) that the supposed effect is really the cause, or in this case that incipient cancer, or a pre-cancerous condition with chronic inflammation, is a factor in inducing the smoking of cigarettes, or (2) that cigarette smoking and lung cancer, though not mutually causative, are both influenced by a common cause, in this case the individual genotype." https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/fisher269.pdf
The current paper: "Although we cannot exclude roles for covariate behaviors of smokers or differences in the biology of cancers arising in smokers compared with nonsmokers, smoking itself is most plausibly the cause of these differences." http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aag0299
Polonium-210 in tobacco contributes to many of the cases of lung cancer worldwide. Most of this polonium is derived from lead-210 deposited on tobacco leaves from the atmosphere; the lead-210 is a product of radon-222 gas, much of which appears to originate from the decay of radium-226 from fertilizers applied to the tobacco soils.
That tobacco contains lead and polonium had been known for decades, but I used to think that it originated from the decay of natural atmospheric radon and these plants just had some unusual tendency to accumulate heavy metals.
Maybe I should put my tinfoil hat on and run away from non-organic food too?
edit:
From the first source:
Tobacco farmers in developed countries primarily use manufactured fertilizer high in phosphates produced from apatite rock that contains radium-226 and descendant radioisotopes such as lead-210 and PO-210. Tobacco is a unique agricultural crop in that its flavor depends on nitrogen reduction, which occurs through the repeated application of high-phosphate fertilizers. The higher the phosphate level of the fertilizer, the higher the concentration of PO-210 in the tobacco plant. Tobacco grown in certain developing countries has approximately one third less radioactivity than tobacco grown in developed countries, and the radioactivity of tobacco grown in the United States has increased over time.
So maybe you are right.
The small yields will limit you to smoking only a few time a month.
You will want to taste that homegrown tobacco so you will most likely invest in a good old wooden pipe. This will make it so that you don't inhale the smoke into your lungs.
You will however still be at risk of mouth and throat cancer.
Mining and it's by products are perfectly "organic".
You cannot remove these hydrocarbons from tobacco as they are only present during pyrolysis.
Further reading: https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Components-Tobacco-Smoke-Sec...
That book is authored by Alan Rodgman (bio below).
After joining R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.’s research department in 1954, Rodgman initiated the company’s research on cigarette smoke composition. He personally conducted and actively directed environmental tobacco smoke research until 1987.
Rodgman became director of research in 1976. During his career, he served on the editorial board of Tobacco Science, the Council for Tobacco Research, the Coresta Scientific Commission and several U.S. government tobacco-related committees.
He was a member of the Chemical Institute of Canada and the American Chemical Society for 60 years and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences for 40 years.
Rodgman published numerous scientific papers on tobacco smoke composition and served as a reviewer for tobacco-related manuscripts. In 2003 he was awarded the inaugural Tobacco Science Research Conference Lifetime Achievement Award for his tobacco-related research and activities. In late 2008 Rodgman co-authored The chemical components of tobacco and tobacco smoke, for which the authors jointly received the 2010 Coresta Award.
Go live in North Korea or Venezuela if you desire having a dear leader who tells you what you should do with your life and leave us alone.
Of course the vast majority said they'd smoke a cigarette.
I've never been a heroin addict, but I've been a tobacco smoker for many years and I can confirm that smoking a cig was definitely the most important thing I had to do in the morning.
Also if I had to spend my last money on food or a pack of cigarettes, obviously and without further consideration, I would choose the cigarettes.
So yeah, pretty addictive.
I'd choose the food.
Cigarettes, on the other hand, I've smoked a couple of times (1 or 2 cigarettes each time), and every time there's been this thought at the back of my head "I should get some cigarettes" for most of the following day. It's obviously not addiction and easy enough to ignore, but it's definitely a noticeable effect. Interestingly two lengthy (4 hour plus) shisha sessions didn't have the same effect (was a little light-headed and felt like I'd had about 50 cups of coffee, but no effects or cravings the following day).
http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/or...
Edit: here another chart showing the 'dependence' of tobacco is very high:
http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/files/1-medical-marijuana...
However withdrawal from benzodiazepines and alcohol are both very dangerous and can lead to death.
http://americanaddictioncenters.org/withdrawal-timelines-tre...
Wow, just wow. This is standard Armitage & Doll model that has been taught since the 1950s.
Every time a cell divides there is some chance of a genetic error occurring. The more generations away from the zygote a cell is, the more genetic errors it will have accumulated.
Activities that damage tissue, etc and necessitate cell division to replenish the cells will contain cells with more errors.
Now that is a vague sketch, but many people have implemented mathematical/computational models based on that idea, beginning with Armitage and Doll in 1954. Unless he is going to reject the model that has been driving cancer research for half a century (which should be noted in the interview), there really is no mystery at all.
Why is that cell allowed to exist then? Isn't there a quality control mechanism or something, that can detect an error occurred and delete the cell?
However, as with anything digital, there is some error rate still. The most common type of cancer mutation will deactivate, p53, a protein that is one of the checkpoint genes.
Having an error rate is essential for evolution and variety, so its not entirely a bad thing.
Wikipedia's entry is a pretty good entry point:
>"These considerations of mechanism suggest that at chronic doses close to the toxic dose, any chemical, whether synthetic or natural, and whether genotoxic or nongenotoxic, is a likely rodent and human carcinogen. Not all chemicals would be expected to be carcinogens at high doses; the MTD may not be reached (101) or the chemical may be toxic without causing cell killing or mitogenesis."
Alcohol can cause inflammation, triggering various parts of the immune system to kick in. This could result in the release of free radicals from these immune cells, which promotes DNA mutations.
1. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/g...
Edit: Corrected autocorrect
Source: an email from my undergrad genetics professor
2005 study on marijuana smoke > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277837/
The main reason tobacco is so dangerous is because you are inhaling smoke and carcinogens that are created in the burning. Burning organic or non-organic makes no difference. You are like firefighter in a burning house without a mask when you inhale.
http://www.livescience.com/7914-warning-homegrown-tobacco-de...
I feel with industrialized cigarettes, most users feel obligated to consume it completely.
My father-in-law would smoke a portion of the cigarette, put it out, and resume later.
Though if you count only DNA changes in smokers' lungs, probably none. Or we would have found some superhuman abilities in smokers by now.
Also, vaping fluids don't contain the many, many compounds which are present in tobacco smoke and known to be dangerous, so it seems quite likely it's significantly safer. The unanswered questions are over what long-term inhalation of vaping fluid might do.
Yes.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-11/raba-evd1104...
Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) Bladder
202 399
Cervix Colorectal cancer
168 559
Esophageal Adenocarcinoma Esophageal Squamous
242 292
Gastric cancer Kidney
472 257
Larynx Liver
123 392
Lung Adeno Lung Squamous
678 175
Oral cavity Ovarian cancer
363 458
Pancreas Pharynx
239 76
Small Cell Lung Cancer
148
"Comparison of overall methylation between smokers and non-smokers was performed for all tobacco-associated cancer types for which there were available data from Illumina Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip array, where each array contains 473,864 autosomal CpG probes. The examined data were downloaded from the original data source (Table S1)
[...]
distributions were subsequently compared between smokers and non-smokers using a two-sample Student’s t-test. Results were considered significant for Bonferroni threshold of 10-7."
So it is not like figure one from that Lew paper, because their effect size is not normalized to the inter-individual variance. This is a point in their favor.
However, the sample sizes do match up to those found in table S1 (which I posted above). From the data provided, we cannot tell whether that difference in p-values is solely due to sample size or not. They need to tell us the variance for each CpG/tissue combo as well.
So, my thinking is, in the same way that you lose quality as you make a copy of a copy in a copy machine the same happens to the cell's DNA. The more a cell has to divide the less the DNA can remain without errors. DNA can tolerate a number of errors but it can eventually lead to cancer. My guess is that not one issues causes the DNA changes but and array of them given the number of substances a cigarette has.
https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/are-former-smokers-safe-after-1...
Any yearly tests to perform?
I was a 10cigs a day smoker for 15 years(quit some years ago) and it really weights heavy on my mind that there is nothing I can do about my past mistakes.