Cigarettes Cause Cancer:
OCHSNER, :ALTON
Cigarettes Cause Cancer By Alton Ochsner CIGARETTES cause cancer. In 1954, some 23,000 Americans will die from lung cancer. In 1955, approximately 25,000 Americans will die from lung cancer. In 95...
...E. Cuyler Hammond, Director, and Dr...
...True, even if you are a heavy smoker, you may not die of cancer...
...On this basis...
...Walter C. Alvarez, consultant in medicine to the Mayo Clinic, has recently written in his popular medical column: "I remember some of my close friends in the medical profession, highly intelligent men, who knew all the dangers of the excessive use of tobacco and yet went on with their chain-smoking until, in their early fifties, they dropped dead with a coronary attack...
...I predict that in 1970, unless preventive measures are taken, lung cancer will account for 18 per cent of all cancer deaths...
...Less smoking may delay the onset of cancer...
...So did the British Medical Journal, the voice of the British Medical Association...
...A light smoker is one who has consumed from one to nine cigarettes a day for the same period...
...In 95 per cent of the cases, death will be traceable to smoking...
...Daniel Horn, Assistant Director of Statistical Research for the American Cancer Society...
...Your digestion will be bad...
...5. "Heavy cigarette smoking more than doubles the death-rate from cancer...
...Of these, 85 per cent will be dead within five years, most of them within two...
...More than that makes him a chain-smoker...
...If they hadn't, lung cancer probably would have got them...
...7. "The findings were based on the study of all other available experimental as well as statistical evidence bearing on the subject...
...If their death-rates had been the same as for non-smokers, only 1,980 would have died...
...The risks of getting lung cancer have been accurately calculated...
...Notwithstanding the accumulation of clinical, statistical and laboratory findings pointing to tobacco as the lurking killer in cancer and heart diseases, many still await the miracle of irrefutable scientific proof--the isolation of the carcinogen or carcinogens in tobacco smoke from something like 200 chemical substances contained in tobacco tars alone...
...More than 22,000 trained ACS volunteers were used...
...Now Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Tulane University's School of Medicine, Dr...
...There are even indications that if you are a man you may become impotent...
...6. "The findings were essentially the same for rural areas as for urban areas...
...The casualties of war--and we are at war with cancer--are the sick and the maimed, as well as the dead...
...The rise in lung-cancer incidence has been so awesome that "it is almost as though the population had been exposed to some new hazard," Dr...
...Charles S. Cameron, Medical and Scientific Director of the American Cancer Society, found the information "so clearly valid--beyond any question of statistical error" that it appeared to warrant publication before the time planned...
...pandemic means widely epidemic...
...The distinguished New England Journal of Medicine found that the evidence associating smoking and cancer must be considered "proof within the ordinary meaning of the word...
...But neither could Koch's postulates, although the lives of millions are affected and controlled on the assumption that they have established beyond question the causative agents of certain infective diseases...
...The world might have remained in a sorry plight for many years if British sanitarians had waited for the discovery of the typhoid germ before accepting clinical and statistical evidence that certain wells in London were the real disease-spreaders...
...You may be able to take more tobacco abuse than others...
...This means that one out of every ten to fifteen men who die in this country in 1970 will die from lung cancer...
...Its author, Alton Ochsner, has been President of the American College of Surgeons (1951-52), President of the American Cancer Society (1949-50) and President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (1947-48...
...Certainly you will lose most of your sense of taste and smell...
...The publication was advanced "to save lives," Dr...
...An excessive smoker consumes from 21 to 24 cigarettes a day...
...if a woman, sterile...
...For most of the medical profession, however, serious debate about cigarette smoking as a factor associated with an increase in the general death-rate ended on June 21, 1954...
...A man of 50 who has smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years has 50 times more chance of contracting lung cancer than a non-smoker...
...You will become progressively more nervous and irritable...
...Proof, by some grisly experiment on human beings, that what produces cancer in animals can produce cancer in man...
...Ochsner is the author of a number of surgical textbooks...
...With honorable exceptions, of course...
...Statistics," it declared, "cannot prove causation...
...Lung cancer is in flood, and the flood is rising...
...On that day, the American Cancer Society submitted a research report to physicians at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in San Francisco...
...Smoking from 10 to 15 cigarettes daily makes one a moderately heavy smoker, and if one has smoked from 16 to 20 a day for 20 years, he is a heavy smoker...
...Research analysts describe a non-smoker as anybody who has not regularly smoked one cigarette per day for 20 years...
...The death-rate for respiratory cancer of white males in the United States was six times greater in 1953 than in 1930...
...3. "Cigarette smoking is associated with an increase in the death-rate from most of the more common sites of cancer in men...
...Lung cancer necessitates drastic surgery...
...The report was the result of a two-and-a-half-year study by Dr...
...Hammond found not merely "an association between cigarette smoking and death-rates...
...The overall finding of the Hammond-Horn report, which struck the headlines with bomblike effect, was that cigarette smokers die sooner than other men in the 50-to-70 age bracket and that they die mainly from cancer and heart disease...
...His book recapitulates the latest research on smoking--in relation not only to cancer but to heart disease and other bodily disorders...
...The survey covered 394 counties throughout the United States...
...You may die of heart disease, or a circulatory ailment, or a cerebral hemorrhage--or you may go blind from nicotine amblyopia...
...This is no idle warning...
...but "a cause-and-effect relationship...
...This is the smoker's choice: Unless you die earlier from something else, you risk death from lung cancer about the age of 55...
...Cancer of the lung is a pandemic disease here and in northern Europe...
...Death statistics show that, in 1920, lung cancer caused 1.1 of every 100,000 deaths...
...But the definite relationship now established is that the more you smoke and the longer you smoke, the greater the risk...
...Of the 4,854 men who had died, a total of 3,022 deaths occurred among regular cigarette smokers...
...in New York...
...In 1948, the lung-cancer deaths rose to 8.3 per 100,000...
...But the mortality rates are only indications...
...And Dr...
...Its conclusions: 1. "Cigarette smoking is associated with an increase in the general death-rate...
...The book is Smoking and Cancer, which has just been published by Julian Messner, Inc...
...more smoking may hasten it...
...If these conclusions seem grim, so is the problem with which they deal...
...The study dealt with the smoking habits of 187,766 men between the ages of 50 and 70, and the analysis was based on the reported deaths of 4.851 men who had died since the project was begun in January 1952...
...Proof has been piled upon proof associating the effects of compulsive smoking with cancer, with heart disease, with general respiratory and other diseases, only to strike a wall of medical skepticism at the outset...
...The equation is simple: The amount you have smoked daily and the number of years you have maintained the habit determine your chances of developing lung cancer...
...You will be troubled by one or more of such respiratory diseases as smoker's cough, smoker's throat, smoker's larynx, smoker's pharynx, smoker's asthma--familiar ailments directly traceable to smoking...
...It is natural that there should be some difference of opinion between non-smoking and smoking doctors...
...Susceptibility, no doubt, plays a role in cancer...
...In only one out of three victims brought to the hospital will the cancer be localized sufficiently so that the cancerous lung can be removed...
...Here we present the opening pages of a book that may, for some time to come, be the last word on its highly controversial subject...
...4. "Heavy smoking nearly doubles the death-rate from diseases of the coronary arteries...
...Charles S. Cameron has stated for the American Cancer Society...
...Hammond declared...
...2. "Even light cigarette smoking is associated with increasing death-rates...
...A little less than half of the total increase observed was attributed to lung carcinoma...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
