Smokeless tobacco safer than smoking

Smokeless tobacco products do not seem to increase cancer risk.

Washington: Smokeless tobacco products, as used in Europe and North America, do not seem to increase cancer risk, according to the latest research.A comprehensive analysis has shown that snuff as used in Scandinavia has no discernible effect on the risk of various cancers.

Products used in the past in the US may have increased the risk, but any effect that exists now seems likely to be quite small. Peter Lee and Jan Hamling, from PN Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd of Britain, carried out the analysis of 89 studies from the US and Scandinavia. They found that, after adjustment for concurrent smoking, any effect of current US products or Scandinavian snuff seems very limited. According to Lee: "It is clear that any effect of smokeless tobacco on risk of cancer, if it exists at all, is quantitatively very much smaller than the known effects of smoking." In 2005 in the US, for men aged 35 or over, there were 142,205 deaths from seven cancers considered to be caused by smoking. If these people had never smoked, Lee and Hamling estimated that the numbers would have reduced by 104,737. If smokeless tobacco was introduced to a similar population of non smokers, this meta-analysis shows that any increase in risk would be negligible compared to the lives saved by reducing cigarette use. Lee said: "Our paper shows very clearly that, in marked contrast to smoking, smokeless tobacco use carries little or no risk of cancer." These results were published in the open access journal BMC Medicine. IANS