Lung Cancer Lung Cancer Basics

The Racial Gap in Smokers' Risk of Lung Cancer

If you light the occasional cigarette or puff through a few every day, your risk of getting lung cancer may depend a lot on your ethnicity.

"There are big differences in lung cancer rates among the races," said Dr. Christopher Haiman, study author and assistant professor at the University of Southern California.

Looking at these differences, Haiman found that low-to-moderate smokers who are African American or Native Hawaiian have a higher risk of lung cancer than whites who smoke the same number of cigarettes. At the other end of the spectrum, Japanese Americans and Latinos have the lowest risk of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes. The results of the study were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Interestingly, while African Americans tend to have a higher rate of lung cancer, they also tend to smoke fewer cigarettes a day than whites.

Haiman followed almost 200,000 cigarette smokers from 1993 to 2001. A total of 1,979 eventually developed lung cancer during this time, but there was a large discrepancy in the ethnicity of those ultimately diagnosed with lung cancer. The biggest gap was seen among those who smoked fewer than 11 cigarettes a day. Of these, Japanese and Latino smokers were 79 percent less likely to develop lung cancer than their black counterparts, while whites were 55 percent less likely than blacks.

Haiman offered a few suggestions for these differences. It is possible that African Americans metabolize nicotine in a way that makes them more prone to cancer, he said, noting that previous studies have shown that blacks have higher levels of carcinogens in their bloodstream than whites or Hispanics after smoking the same number of cigarettes.

Dietary differences, the type of cigarette smoked and even differences in the amount of nicotine inhaled with each puff may also be the cause for these differences, he added.

However, once a person becomes a heavy smoker—going through 30 or more cigarettes a day—the racial gap disappears. At this point, there are so many carcinogens in your body from the excessive amount of nicotine that any advantage from ethnicity is rendered helpless.

Regardless of your ethnic background, Haiman's suggestion is simply to stop smoking: "We know that it causes 80 to 90 percent of all lung cancers, so not smoking is the best way to prevent this disease."