Early life exposure to tobacco smoke and ovarian cancer risk in adulthood
Once again the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) has provided valuable information about ovarian cancer. The NHS began in 1973 and enlisted more than 120,000 participants who responded to detailed questioning and follow-up to help clarify the epidemiology of many diseases including ovarian cancer. There are now three generations of the NHS with more than 300,000 recruits.
This report correlates the incidence of ovarian cancer with early exposure to tobacco smoke, long thought to be a risk factor for the disease. Data from 220,000 responses from NHS1 and NHS2 show no increase in relative risk for women whose mother smoked during pregnancy.
Surprisingly those women who subsequently smoked did not show an increase in risk of developing ovarian cancer and starting early (18 or younger) did not increase the risk. However, exposure to passive smoke as a child, with parents smoking, did increase the overall relative risk to a small degree, with a 15% increase in the incidence of ovarian cancer in adulthood.
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