BMJ  2003;327:501-502 (30 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7413.501-b

Letter

Passive smoking

Paper does not diminish conclusion of previous reports

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Editor—I am writing on behalf of members of the 2002 working group on involuntary smoking and cancer for the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).¹ We concluded that environmental tobacco smoke causes lung cancer among never smokers. The paper by Enstrom and Kabat² does not diminish this conclusion or those of previous reports.^3–5

Enstrom and Kabat's paper was based on one of the 25 US states (California) in the American Cancer Society's prevention study. The relative risk of lung cancer in never smoking women married to ever smokers was reported as 0.99 (95% confidence interval 0.72 to 1.37), based on only 177 cases, whereas the IARC meta-analysis, based on 46 studies and 6257 cases, yielded an estimate of 1.24 (95% confidence interval 1.14 to 1.34).¹ The estimate of Enstrom and Kabat is consistent with both an increased risk of lung cancer (the confidence interval includes the IARC estimate of . . . [Full text of this article]

Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre, University College London, London NW1 2ND allan.hackshaw@ctc.ucl.ac.uk

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Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98

James E Enstrom and Geoffrey C Kabat
BMJ 2003 326: 1057. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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