According to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, some smokers may be able to avoid lung cancer with an efficient DNA damage repair system. They talked about it in a magazine article. Nature Genetics.
Smoking is the main cause of lung cancer, but it does not develop in all smokers. To find out why some smokers live to old age without developing cancer, the researchers used bronchoscopy to collect lung epithelial cell samples from 19 smokers, from 14 never-smokers ages 11-86 and up to 116 smokers ages 44-81. called pack-years – the number of cigarettes smoked per day multiplied by the duration of smoking in years and divided by 20. The older the person in the study, the more mutations accumulate in the cells, but in smokers this happens much faster, which increases. probability of developing cancer.
Although the effect was dose-dependent, the rate of mutations did not differ among participants who exceeded the 23 pack-year threshold.
“The heaviest smokers didn’t have the highest mutation rate. Our data shows that these people were able to survive this long despite heavy smoking because they were able to suppress the accumulation of more mutations. Leveling up these mutations is too much for these people to repair DNA damage or detoxify cigarette smoke.” may be due to the fact that they have effective systems,” he said.
The scientists hope that the results of their work will lead to the development of new tests to measure the body’s ability to repair or detoxify DNA; this could form the basis of a new way of assessing the risk of developing lung cancer.