Elsevier

Lung Cancer

Volume 35, Issue 2, February 2002, Pages 119-127
Lung Cancer

Alcoholic beverages consumption and lung cancer cell types among women in Poland

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5002(01)00331-2Get rights and content

Abstract

The case-control study concerning etiological factors of lung cancer in women, covered 242 cases with histologically confirmed diagnosis of lung cancer and 352 female healthy controls. The results of multivariate analysis, which was adjusted for the effects of smoking exposure as well as other variables, have shown that usual past vodka-drinking women demonstrated significantly higher risk than non-drinking women. Significant dose–response relationships were observed for each histologic type separately. Usual past vodka drinking (at least ≥100 g) significantly increased the risk in all histologic subgroups separately, but the highest risk was observed for small cell carcinoma. For adenocarcinoma, vodka drinking significantly increased risk at the lower (<100 g) and the higher (≥100 g) levels of drinking. Results of the study confirmed synergistic influence of vodka drinking and cigarette smoking on the risk of developing lung cancer. In the presented study, there was also observed significant influence of usual past vodka drinking on lung cancer risk for lifelong non-smokers.

Introduction

The relationship between alcohol consumption and lung cancer has been examined in cohort, case-control and ecological studies, although a confounding factor, such as cigarette smoking, was not always controlled [13].

The association of alcohol with different histologic types of lung cancer in women has not received much attention in the studies conducted so far.

This paper reports the results from one part of the case-control study examining, among variety of suspected risk factors, the importance of alcoholic beverages drinking for specific lung cell types in women, which was undertaken in Cracow, Poland, between 1991 and 1997.

Section snippets

Material and methods

The cases were 242 women with primary carcinoma of the lung (9th Revision, ICD 162), histologically verified, who were admitted to the M. Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Institute in Cracow, Poland.

Squamous-cell carcinoma accounted for 37% of all cases, 36% were small cell carcinoma, 21% adenocarcinoma and 6% were mixed and other types.

The controls were 352 healthy women randomly selected from next-of-kin of other patients without tobacco related cancer, who were admitted to the M. Sklodowska-Curie

Results

The median age for squamous-cell carcinoma was 62.0 years, for small cell carcinoma 58.0 years, for adenocarcinoma 59.0 years, and the median age for all cases was 61.0. The median age for controls was 58.0.

Table 1 shows the relation of consumption frequency of different alcoholic beverages to different histologic types and to all combined histologic types of lung cancer.

For cases who were vodka drinkers the following distribution was observed, 72.4% small cell carcinoma; 71.1% adenocarcinoma;

Discussion

Association between alcohol consumption and lung cancer has not been described consistently in literature. Also relationship between alcohol and specific histologic types of lung cancer has not been well-documented in literature. It has generally been caused by the limited statistical power of most studies to stratify by cell type.

From 19 cohort studies examined for relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of lung cancer, only eight were controlled for tobacco smoking [2], [14],

References (21)

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