Nicotine Gum "cancer risk"

[Kula]

Not sure if this has already been posted but I couldnt see it.

Nicotine gum 'is a cancer risk'


Cheers.

Kula.

[JamesD]

Just someone trying to play up the newly-constructed "connection" between nicotine and cancer. Since nicotine does not cause cancer, they're now saying that it somehow makes cancer worse, or at least keeps it from getting better or makes you more succeptible to it. Most of the sheeple then get the "confirmation" that nicotine causes cancer 'cause that's what they thought to begin with. They pull up articles like this and don't understand the phrase "interact with a mutation that increases the risk of cancer," so they just lazily interpret it as "causes cancer" b/c they can't really understand what all those words mean together. I wouldn't worry about it.

JamesD

[Kula]

BTW I was'nt agreeing with the article - merely posting a link for people to see what is out there (maybe I should'nt have). There seems to be scaremongering at every corner. Any medical folks I have spoken to (some of them family members) are delighted that I have managed to give up tobacco. None of them seem to have an issue with nicotine itself.

I am just glad that I have managed to give up analogs as a result of e-cigarettes. I have no intention of giving up vaping or nicotine.

Kula.

[Lika]

"While nicotine increased cancer-like properties of some cells in the laboratory, these findings do not prove that nicotine replacement products are specifically associated with an increased risk of cancer." And the headline is: Nicotine gum is a cancer risk

Don't we all just love articles like this one that contradicts itself? It really is up to consumers read between the lines to draw their own conclusions on just about anything we read in the news.

[Mohave]

It's the patient information website of Great Britain's National Health Service, in a section on "health (issues reported elsewhere) in the news." I thought it was more clear and sensible at putting the lurid headline into some scientific context in the body of the piece than many others. Someone there probably read the original research paper, and may have had more than a semester of "Overview of Science for Liberal Arts Majors 101" or is at least used to writing about science related issues, rather than occasionally doing so quickly off a press release before moving on to the next unrelated topic.

While nicotine increased cancer-like properties of some cells in the laboratory, these findings do not prove that nicotine replacement products are specifically associated with an increased risk of cancer.

On their own, these findings do not indicate whether the use of nicotine replacement products is associated with an increased risk of mouth cancer. This would require studies specifically comparing the rate of these cancers in users and non-users of these products.

[f_frederickskitty]

From Dr Karl & the Naked Scientist, BBC Radio this morning. Interesting/worrying....

MP3 clip - http tinyurl.com / cnbupe

Sorry, can't start new posts yet, or url's (I hope you can decipher the one above)

[Mohave]

Originally Posted by f_frederickskitty

From Dr Karl & the Naked Scientist...

I trust you won't mind if I post the url in clickable form for you:

http://www.macalchemist.net/e-cig/e-cigs.mp3

What the recent spate of reports on nicotine (alone) and oral cancer have in common is that they are hypotheses about what the result might eventually be, based on something observed in the lab without epidemiological information to determine if that eventually is the result. That isn't a fault in the lab observations; that work just did what it can do.

The theory on what it could lead to in some people tends to be contradicted by an analysis of the 18 published papers which DID look at actual health results in a comparison of users of a particular kind of oral (snus) tobacco: "While studies were underpowered to detect small increases in mortality risk compared to no tobacco use, results suggested that the product does not lead to significant risks for these [cancer] outcomes...<SNIP>...However, there was no increased risk for all-cancer mortality..." Of course the reason snus had actual health data to look at, while nicotine alone had only lab work, is that snus has been used for a few hundred years, and nicotine alone separate from tobacco is new.

There may be some increased risk for some other things (cardiovascular) found in the "real world" data, but cancer did not appear to be among them. So, this means that: the theory produced by the lab results is not correct in predicting the hypothesized health outcome, or that the outcome is weak, or the 18 research papers looking at health data were not adequate to find it, or that that oral nicotine in the particular form of snus tobacco is actually better for you than nicotine alone. That last possibility seems intuitively unlikely to me.

I think this experimental work makes a good case for further study, though not alarm (if the act of broiling and eating a cheeseburger or roasting a marshmallow was given similar scrutiny we would have a bunch of similar questions raised about compounds inhaled in cooking and ingested in eating), but what worries me most is how this will be translated to the general public and policy makers and (mis)used politically.

On a side note, I tend to prefer my scientists fully clothed, though there was this one pre-med gal back in college...