"Light" Smoking is No Refuge from Lung Cancer

The University of Cincinnati's Marshall Anderson and his colleagues in Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium uncovered a risk locus on chromosome 6q that increases a person's risk of developing lung cancer even if that person is a light smoker. The study, which is published in Cancer Research, found that for family members born without this variant, the risk of developing lung cancer tracked very closely with level of smoking — smoke more, have a higher risk of lung cancer. But in family members born with this risk haplotype, even light smoking resulted in greatly increased risk for developing lung cancer, and increasing smoking only marginally increased the risk.