Risk Factors For Lung Cancer

Risk Factors: What causes cancer?
What are the most common cause of lung cancer? 
Are there other risk factors as tobacco and cigarettes? 
What about environmental factors, radiation or heredity?

The following text provides an overview of the currently known and is called knowledge sources, and links to more tips. It is aimed at people who want information or need general tips on preventing concrete. For already sick patients is important to know: What exactly has caused her personal illness, can not explain in retrospect often safe, but only estimated approximately.

Development of lung cancer: What hurts, what protects?
Presumably, in the development of lung cancer many different factors involved in common. In affected patients can not often find in retrospect, what exactly has caused their illness in detail. Some factors that increase, according to research, the average risk of the disease are, however, well known.

Best prevention: risk factors to avoid
The following risk factors should be avoided:

    Smoking and passive smoking
    " asbestos "of older buildings or in the workplace
    The noble gas radon : It occurs in certain areas of Germany, available in natural stone and can be reached from the floor in the apartments.
    Radiation exposure from medical tests , for example by frequent X-ray - or CT studies. In particular, in studies of early detection of lung cancer must be balanced against the benefits of research against this risk.
    Diesel exhaust and other air pollutants

A healthy lifestyle can affect the risk of lung cancer is also positive:

    Diet that is rich in fruits, fresh vegetables and tomatoes seem to reduce the risk of developing lung cancer.
    Also, physical activity lowers the risk out more about " Sport and physical activity in Krebsvorbugung ".
    Medicines and dietary supplements for prevention are not recommended outside of clinical trials. Some substances, such as beta-carotenoids (a precursor of vitamin A) are suspected to increase the risk of lung cancer especially in smokers even.

Smoking
The most important risk factor by far is tobacco smoke, which contains hundreds of harmful substances. Male smokers have a twenty to thirty times as likely to suffer as Non smoking to lung cancer. Smokers have a nine times as great risk of lung cancer as never-smokers. Since the late 1990s, the number of women who died from lung cancer has expanded continuously. This is attributed primarily to changes in smoking behavior and an increase in female smokers in general.

Approximately one in ten smokers suffering from lung cancer during his lifetime, an average of 30 to 40 years after the start of tobacco use. Cigarette smoke can ill for eight to nine out of ten male lung cancer patients and in three to six out of ten women are assumed to be the main cause. For pipe smokers and cigar smokers, the risk for lung cancer is slightly lower than for cigarette smokers, but still much higher than in nonsmokers. Each year an estimated 36,000 people die from lung cancer due to smoking in Germany.

The risk also depends heavily on how much a person has smoked. Experts calculate it using the "pack years" (English: pack years). These are calculated from the number of boxes that a person smokes per day, shot down by the number of years that he has smoked. Has anyone smoked for twenty years and a half packs of cigarettes a day, he has a risk of 30 pack years, as someone who for thirty years, has smoked a pack a day.

Passive Smoking
Even passive smoking increases the risk: In the so-called side-stream smoke is still a large number of pollutants included. The German Cancer Research Center estimates that passive passive smoking each year about 280 people leads to lung cancer, 260 Non smoking die in Germany every year on a lung cancer because they were exposed to tobacco smoke.

Is it worth it to stop?
At the end of smoking decreases the risk of suffering from a lung carcinoma. The effect is visible after a few years. However, it takes twenty to thirty years, has adapted itself to the lung cancer risk of ex-smokers to that of a never-smoker. Also, the morbidity and mortality risk for other diseases remains to ex-smokers compared to never smokers even increased for a long time. To make accurate time information is difficult, the data in the literature this is not a total uniform.