Relationship of Cigarette Smoking to Lung Cancer

Our plain-English summary of Relationship of Cigarette Smoking to Lung Cancer, by A. Ochsner (1955).

The study

• Author: A. Ochsner
• Published: Rocky Mountain Medical Journal p113-119 February (1955)
• Type of article: Journal article
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This 1955 article was not a study of asbestos. It was a narrative review, given as an address before a medical society, of evidence on cigarette smoking and lung cancer. The author collected no new data and instead discussed death statistics and other researchers' work. The author reported that the lung cancer death rate among white men in the United States reached 27.1 per 100,000 in 1948, an increase of 411 per cent since 1930. The author described an American Cancer Society survey by Hammond and Horn that interviewed 204,547 white men aged 50 to 70. In that survey, the lung cancer death rate among men smoking a pack or more a day was nine times that of men who never smoked or smoked occasionally. The author also cited animal experiments by Graham and Wynder, in which 44 per cent of animals painted with tar from cigarette smoke developed cancer after two years. A study of doctors by Doll and Hill was cited as well. The author concluded that this evidence was proof of a causal relationship between smoking and cancer.

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.

What the study did and found

• Design: narrative review given as a presented address; the author discusses published statistics and other researchers' studies and reports no original data
• Who was studied: No study population of the author's own. The author reviewed national death statistics (United States, Holland, England and Wales) and other studies, chiefly an American Cancer Society survey of 204,547 white men aged 50 to 70 in several US states (190,134 usable), and a study of doctors by Doll and Hill.
• Exposure: Cigarette smoking, by amount smoked. Asbestos is not discussed. Chromium and uranium are mentioned only as accepted industrial hazards for lung cancer.
• Main results:
  • The lung cancer death rate in white males in the United States rose to 27.1 per 100,000 in 1948, an increase of 411 per cent over 1930. These are vital statistics cited by the author. The 1930 starting rate is damaged in the scan and is not reported here.
  • In the American Cancer Society survey cited by the author, 4,854 of the men (2.6 per cent) had died at the end of two years.
  • In the same survey (Hammond), the lung cancer death rate in men aged 50 to 70 who smoked a pack or more of cigarettes a day was nine times that of men who never smoked or smoked occasionally.
  • In animal experiments by Graham and Wynder cited by the author, tar from machine-smoked cigarettes was applied to animals' skin. After two years, 44 per cent of the animals developed cancer.
  • In the Doll and Hill study of doctors cited by the author, doctors smoking 25 or more cigarettes a day had 13 observed lung cancer deaths against 7.33 expected.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that three things together proved a causal relationship between smoking and cancer: the rise in lung cancer, its parallel with cigarette consumption, and the finding of a cancer-producing agent in cigarette smoke.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Lung Cancer.

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