Pancreatic Cancer & Smoking

Smoking Further Linked to Deadly Pancreatic Cancer
Thu Jan 27, 2005 04:58 PM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Smoking may speed the growth of pancreatic cancer by causing it to develop in younger people, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

The study, presented at a meeting of cancer specialists in Chicago, may help doctors better understand a particularly deadly cancer, which kills virtually all of its victims within a year.

Dr. Randall Brand and colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois studied 18,346 pancreatic cancer patients treated between 1993 and 2003. The patients, taken from a database of 350 hospitals around the country, all gave smoking histories.

"Smoking appears to accelerate the onset of pancreatic cancer development," Brand told a news conference.

The median age for the patients was 73. But current smokers were diagnosed at 63 -- a full 10 years sooner. People who had smoked in the past and quit were diagnosed at age 70.

Brand said other studies have indicated that smoking can affect both the initial development and spread of cancer.

"Since the age of diagnosis of previous smokers was younger than nonsmokers, this suggests that smoking could impact upon the initiation phase," Brand said.

In 2005, an estimated 32,180 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and 31,800 people will die from it, according to American Cancer Society projections. It is the fourth leading cause of cancer death.

"Since pancreatic cancer is almost uniformly fatal, a younger age of onset means more potential years of life lost. Thus, these findings offer yet another important reason for individuals not only to stop smoking, but never to start," Brand said.

Smoking also causes lung, esophageal and bladder cancer, among others.

A second study presented at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology found that adding a new drug to standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer gave some patients a few extra weeks of life.

The new drug, erlotinib, is sold under the brand name Tarceva by Genentech Inc. and OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc. and is one of a new generation of targeted cancer drugs that affects a molecule used by tumor cells to grow.

For the study, half of a group of 569 pancreatic cancer patients got a standard therapy, Eli Lilly & Co.'s gemcitabine or Gemzar, while the other half got Gemzar plus Tarceva.

After a year, 24 percent of the patients who got Tarceva were alive, compared to 17 percent of patients given Gemzar alone.

"This is a difficult disease to treat," said Dr. Malcolm Moore of Canada's National Cancer Institute, who led the trial. "This is a bit of a light and gives us some clues about how we can improve the treatment of this condition."