Blog Assignment 2

This week we read a study from Japan titled “Non-smoking wives of heavy smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer.” This study focused on 91,540 non-smoking wives aged 40 and above, and upon a 14 year follow up study, standardized mortality rates for lung cancer were assessed according to their husbands smoking habits. The results of the study showed that wives of heavy smokers were found to have a higher risk of developing lung cancer than wives of non-smokers. These results were deemed statistically significant by the researchers.

I find this study to be very interesting and important. What is so interesting is how clearly their data depicts the dangers of second hand smoke or passive smoking, as it is referred to in the study. The number of lung cancer related deaths in women whose husbands were deemed heavy smokers was staggeringly higher than those of non-smokers and even groups whose husbands only smoked occasionally. What is so important about a study such as this is that it put a great deal of strength behind showing people the true dangers of smoking, especially for the time period in which this study was published. Even more so than displaying the immediate dangers of smoking, this study shows people that when you smoke you are not just affecting your own health, but you can seriously harm your loved ones and others around you over time. Although this study mainly focused on non-smoking wives of heavy smoking husbands the implications of its results can be applied to any group of people living with a heavy smoker, such as child and relatives, as this is a risk to anyone exposed to a great deal of passive smoke over time.

The advantage to using this type of study is in the large number of subjects analyzed and followed up on for 14 years. Not only does this give the researchers a more accurate depiction of the population at large, it also gives them a better basis to look at particular confounding variables in greater detail, which allowed them to strengthen the results of the study. Due to the fact that they studied so many people, they were able to see that under a particular variable, heavy smoking husbands, lung cancer rates were much higher than other cancer rates among that group. They were also able to show that other activities of the husband, such as higher alcohol consumption had no effect on their wives risk of cancer.

I would argue that the results of this study definitely support second-had smoke as a cause of lung cancer. First, the study results are reliable because of the large of subjects participating in the study. Second, there was a strong measurement between exposure and disease which points to a likelihood of a cause and effect relationship. Similarly, there was a dose-response relationship seen is this study certainly pointing towards passive smoking as causing lung cancer in the subjects. Finally, this study’s results have been supported by various other studies, which also point towards a very strong cause and effect relationship.