Cervical cancer, smoking linked

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 13

Cervical cancer, smoking linked

NZPA-Reuter Davtona Beach. Florida

Recent studies have given support to the view that there may be a causal relationship between smoking and cervical cancer in women.

"I think there would be a significant reduction in cervical cancer if there were a significant reduction in women smoking." Dr Warren Winkelstein. of the University of California at Berkeley, .told a science writers' seminar.

An epidemiologist who first suggested a possible link between tobacco and cervical cancer in 1977, Dr Winkelstein said that six subsequent studies had tended to support his hypothesis. After breast cancer, cervical and lung cancer, which doctors say is clearly caused by smoking, combine to make up the second most prevalent form of cancer in women.

Dr Winkelstein and others say the connection is apparently related to the fact that both cancers are found in the same type of (equamous epithelial) tissue which line the lung and the cervix, and this tissue is sensitive to carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. Dr Winkelstein said that there was evidence that car-

cinogens entering the lung could be carried by the blood to other parts of the body, which could explain why tobacco carcinogens apparently affected the cervix.

He also noted that there was a higher rate of cervical cancer associated with promiscuity in women. However, he discounted some earlier theories that linked promiscuity and smoking together and suggested the former might be the sole cause of cervical cancer.

He said that a recent study in Utah showed that female smokers, independent of their sexual experience. were 17 times more likely to get cervical cancer than non-smokers.

Dr Winkelstein's report, made at a seminar sponsored by the American Cancer Society, said, “A substantial proportion of cancer in females would now apparently be preventable if the common practice of smoking cigarettes could be curtailed." He also noted that the association of smoking with cervical cancer was recently observed to be greatest in young women, the group reported to be one of the few’ increasing smoking while the general population has begun to cut down on it.