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NEW ORLEANS, Mar 28, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Although cigarette smoking is associated with a number of deadly cancers, researchers said Wednesday that the tobacco habit appears to reduce risk of a rare skin cancer found among elderly men who live in Mediterranean regions.
"Smokers had about a 50 percent risk of developing classical Kaposi's sarcoma," said Dr. James Goedert, chief of the viral epidemiology branch of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md.
Nevertheless, Dr. Waun Ki Hong of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, commented the findings shouldn't be considered justification to start or not quit smoking.
"We know that cigarette smoking kills thousands of people a year," said Hong, who is also president of the American Association for Cancer Research, which sponsored the meeting at which Goedert spoke. "The study on Kaposi's sarcoma involves a very few patients with a very rare disease, so it is not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions from this work."
Classical Kaposi's sarcoma is a skin disease that typically develops in the legs of elderly men -- over age 70 -- who live in southern Italy, Greece, Israel and other areas of the Mediterranean, said Goedert. An invasive and deadly form of Kaposi's sarcoma often inflicts patients who have AIDS.
Goedert and colleagues studied men and women who lived in western Sicily, contrasting those with Kaposi's sarcoma to other age-matched individuals who were also infected with Kaposi's sarcoma herpes virus. KSHV infection is required to produce the lesions that are symptomatic of the disease.
In a presentation at the New Orleans meeting, Goedert said that 23 of 48 patients with Kaposi's Sarcoma were regular cigarette smokers, but 40 of 49 of the control subjects -- 82 percent -- smoked cigarettes. Goedert said too few women were in the same group of smokers to determine if there was any protective effect for females.
Goedert suggested smoking might interfere with the cascade of molecular events that create inflammatory responses, which in turn may cause the cancer to develop.
Goedert joined AACR's Hong in saying he would not recommend smoking, even to members of the populations being studied.
"These studies suggest smoking produces a lower risk of developing a rare disease that seldom is fatal," he summarized.
From the time of diagnosis, about nine years pass before patients with the disease die. But Goedert said that because Kaposi's Sarcoma rarely occurs in these populations before age 70, death frequently is the result of other diseases.
In another study, researchers found that smoking marijuana does not appear to increase risks of developing oral squamous cell cancers.
Karin Rosenblatt, associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the study was undertaken to see whether data she and colleagues collected while she was working in Washington state could confirm previous studies showing a link between marijuana and oral cancer.
"We did not see a relationship," Rosenblatt said.
Dr. Ed Nelson, a professor of toxicology at the University of Essen, Germany, said finding a link between marijuana smoking and oral cancer would be difficult because "almost everyone who smokes marijuana also smokes cigarettes and we know cigarettes causes mouth cancers." In fact, less than 10 percent of the subject's in Rosenblatt's study were non-cigarette smokers.
By ED SUSMAN, UPI Science News
Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
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