Smoking reduces nasopharyngeal cancer survival

By Lynda Williams, Senior medwireNews Reporter

Both current and former smoking have a significant impact on the prognosis of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma, Chinese researchers caution.

“It is clear that cigarette smoking not only promotes carcinogenesis in the normal nasopharyngeal

epithelium, but also affects the survival of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma,” say Fang-Yun Xie (Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou) and co-authors in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.

Overall, 1849 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma were followed-up for a median of 73.5 months during which time 8.1% experienced locoregional relapse, 12.6% distant metastases, and 20.4% of patients died. The 5-year overall and progression-free survival rates were 82.2% and 74.2%, respectively.

The team found current smokers and formers smokers had a significantly increased risk for death than never smokers (hazard ratio [HR]=1.67 and 1.46, respectively), after adjusting for a raft of confounding factors including gender, alcohol consumption, and tumor characteristics.

A similar relationship was also found for progression-free survival, with HRs of 1.74 and 1.41, respectively. Although current or former smoking did not significantly reduce survival for female patients and those with a history of drinking alcohol, the researchers say this may be due to the small patient numbers.

The team detected a dose–response effect, with heavy smokers (defined as >22 pack–years) having significantly poorer overall and progression-free survival than smokers with fewer pack–years. For each additional pack–year, the HR for both overall and progression-free survival increased by 2%.

The majority of patients received radiotherapy plus chemotherapy, while 23.4% were treated with radiotherapy alone. When the researchers examined the outcomes of the 495 patients who were treated with intensity-modulated radiotherapy or three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy, the impact of current and former smoking mirrored the whole group.

"Previous studies have found that cancer patients resume smoking after treatment because of a higher perceived difficulty of quitting, and lower perceptions of their cancer-related risk," Xie commented in a press release.

"Our finding that cigarette smoking lowers the chance of survival for nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients, with a dose-response relationship, is a key fact that the general audience should keep in mind."

Licensed from medwireNews with permission from Springer Healthcare Ltd. ©Springer Healthcare Ltd. All rights reserved. Neither of these parties endorse or recommend any commercial products, services, or equipment.

Comments

The opinions expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of News Medical.
Post a new comment
Post

While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. We do not provide medical advice, if you search for medical information you must always consult a medical professional before acting on any information provided.

Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles.

Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

Read the full Terms & Conditions.

You might also like...
AI-powered tool predicts gene activity in cancer cells from biopsy images