[caption id="attachment_73574" align="aligncenter" width="396"] study finds no clear link with lung cancer and second hand smoke Marcel Clemens | Dreamstime.com[/caption]In the fight against smoking, crusaders have long insisted that secondhand smoke can cause lung cancer in others. But now a new study has revealed that there is no clear link between the action of smokers and the development of lung cancer in individuals who inhale their smoke. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute outlines an indepth study conducted that included over 75,000 women who smoked and a definitive link to their developing lung cancer more often than non-smokers. But there are no substantive link between being exposed to passive sources of smoke and developing lung cancer discovered.
“The fact that passive smoking may not be strongly associated with lung cancer points to a need to find other risk factors for the disease [in nonsmokers],” said Ange Wang, the Stanford University medical student who presented the study at the June 2013 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
Critics of the study, however, say that the research did not focus on the other health hazards that exist when someone is exposed to secondhand smoke. These include the development of cardiopulmonary disease as well as aggravation of asthma. Critics are contending that while the study may conclude that low levels of passive exposure to someone else's cigarette or cigar smoke may not increase their risk of developing cancer of the lungs, being exposed to secondhand smoke still carries a certain amount of health risks.
“The strongest reason to avoid passive cigarette smoke is to change societal behavior: to not live in a society where smoking is a norm,” said Dr. Jyoti Patel of Northwestern University School of Medicine.
Currently, the Centers of Disease Control estimates that secondhand smoke causes 3400 cancer deaths annually.