Lung Cancer : What causes it?
A risk factor is any agent that increases the risk of developing a particular disease, ie, a person exposed to this factor has more chances of getting the disease.
Several factors that are related with lung cancer. These include:
Snuff: between 80-90% of lung cancers occur in smokers, or who have recently quit, but no concrete evidence that smoking is associated with a specific histological subtype, but tends to relate more to the with squamous cell carcinoma and small cell cancer, and less frequently with adenocarcinoma. Smokers have a risk of 10 to 20 times more likely to develop lung cancer (according to the number of cigarettes smoked per day) than non-smokers. The use of snuff light does not change the risk of the disease.
Passive smokers also have increased the risk of developing lung cancer. In general terms, is similar to that of smokers of one to two cigarettes a day. Of the components of smoke carcinogens snuff out as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Quitting smoking reduces the risk of developing lung cancer, so that after 15 years approximates that of nonsmokers. This decrease depends on all of the time of consumption.
Occupations: workers in contact with asbestos (insulation, mining, textile industry) and petroleum and its derivatives, have a higher lung cancer rates. It has also been correlated with exposure to nickel and radon.
Age: As in most tumors, the risk of developing lung cancer increases with age.
Sex: Men have a lung cancer rate three times higher than women. This is because the female population that has begun in the habit of smoking 30-40 years later than men.
Genetic factors: the risk of developing lung cancer is multiplied by four when a family history of the disease.
Benign: Patients diagnosed with COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) are at increased risk of developing lung cancer. It has also been correlated with pulmonary fibrosis or scleroderma language.