The Role of Smoking in the Development of Lung Cancer

This book chapter does not concern asbestos. It examined cigarette smoking and microscopic changes in the lining of the airways. Drawing on three studies, the authors examined up to 55 cross-sections of the bronchial tubes from each of 402 men. Of these, 339 died of causes other than lung cancer (65 had never smoked cigarettes and 274 had), and 63 died of lung cancer. Not one section from the 65 nonsmokers showed a precancerous change. Overall, 956 of 19,797 sections had lesions made entirely of atypical cells, which the authors interpreted as precancerous. Tiny early invasive cancers were found in 23 of these sections: 20 came from 7 men who died of lung cancer, and 3 came from two men who smoked 1 to 2 packages a day and died of other causes. Precancerous lesions were found in 4 (11%) of 36, 15 (25%) of 59 and 69 (48%) of 143 men in successively heavier smoking groups, and in 52 (83%) of the men who died of lung cancer. The authors concluded that cigarette smoking is the single most important factor in lung cancer in men. They noted that how these lesions would have behaved is unknown.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.

We publish pages from a book for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.