Proving Lung Cancer is Caused by Smoking
Facts About Smoking and Lung Cancer

Facts about lung cancer have been gathered rigorously and analyzed relentlessly with a view to describing what causes lung cancer once and for all.

The results are always the same. In 90% of cases, you get lung cancer from smoking cigarettes. Over seventy years of scientific study has proven these facts about lung cancer over and over again.

Historically many physicians and other scientists had long suspected a relationship between smoking and lung cancer, but since not all people who smoked developed lung cancer they were at a loss as to how to prove it.

When the cases of lung cancer first were noted to be rising nobody wanted to believe that lung cancer was one of the harmful smoking effects on the body, least of all the people (including physicians and scientists) who were smokers.

Smoking Facts about Lung Cancer
Proving That Lung Cancer is Caused by Smoking

The relationship between disease and the factors that promote it are determined by epidemiological studies.

Retrospective Studies Prove That Lung Cancer is Caused by Smoking

It is called a retrospective study because it starts with people who already have lung cancer and goes back through their history to see how many factors they all have in common.

Using statistical analysis it can be determined if a specific factor (in this case smoking) is significant to the majority of people with the disease.

It would be the retrospective studies that formed the foundation for the early conclusions that smoking is what causes lung cancer and these studies would have been part of the 7000 documents reviewed by the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health in 1964 when the shocking revelation was made that you can get lung cancer from smoking.

More Smoking Facts About Lung Cancer
Prospective Studies

A prospective study to determine if lung cancer is caused by smoking would start with a non-diseased population matched for various characteristics such as age or gender and then follow them over time to see who gets lung cancer.

When you start a study with a non-diseased population it takes much longer for the study results to come in because you have to follow the population over a lifetime.

The British doctors study was the first long term prospective study that was able to provide the epidemiological evidence that you develop lung cancer from smoking cigarettes.

A group of male British physicians were recruited into the study to be followed over their lifetime. Regular follow up occurred from 1951 until 2001.

The link between smoking, lung cancer and a host of other smoking related diseases became apparent by following the group for over 50 years.

It was one of the first prospective studies to link smoking and lung cancer, but over the 50 yrs the study was in progress other retrospective studies were continuing to confirm that bronchogenic carcinoma was a smoking related disease.

Believe the Smoking Facts About Lung Cancer or the Smoking Fiction

It is Your Choice

Neither retrospective nor prospective studies prove that you will get lung cancer if you smoke cigarettes. They only prove that a relationship exists. When that relationship becomes so profound such as 90% of people with lung cancer have a history of tobacco smoke exposure then that relationship can be said to be causal.

You can make the choice to deny that lung cancer is caused by smoking.

The facts however, do not change just because you choose to engage in smoking fiction.

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