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Passive smoking at home and cancer risk: a population-based prospective study in Japanese nonsmoking women

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Abstract

Objectives: To investigate the relationship between passive smoking at home and the incidence of various cancers in a population-based prospective study.

Methods: The subjects were 9675 Japanese lifelong nonsmoking women aged over 40 years who lived in three municipalities of Miyagi Prefecture, and completed a self-administration questionnaire in 1984. During 9 years of follow-up, 426 cancers were identified by record linkage to the population-based cancer registry. The data were analyzed using the Cox proportional hazards model.

Results: The age-adjusted relative risks (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) of smoking-related cancers and lung cancer for women who had smoking husbands, compared with women whose husbands did not smoke, were 1.7 (0.94–2.9, p = 0.079) and 1.9 (0.81–4.4, p = 0.14), respectively. In contrast, a significant inverse association was observed for breast cancer; the RR (95% CI) was 0.58 (0.34–0.99, p = 0.047). After multivariate adjustment for confounding factors, the risks of smoking-related cancers and breast cancer were materially unchanged.

Conclusions: These results show that passive smoking may affect the risk of cancers other than lung cancer.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Public Health, Department of Social Medicine, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, 2-1, Seiryo-machi, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8575, Japan

    Yoshikazu Nishino & Yoshitaka Tsubono

  2. Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Yoshitaka Tsubono

  3. Faculty of Physical Education, Sendai College, Miyagi, Japan

    Shoko Komatsu

  4. Miyagi University School of Nursing, Miyagi, Japan

    Haruo Nakatsuka

  5. Department of Public Health, Yamagata University School of Medicine, Yamagata, Japan

    Akira Fukao

  6. Environmental Health Sciences, Department of Social Medicine, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan

    Hiroshi Satoh

Authors
  1. Yoshikazu Nishino
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  2. Yoshitaka Tsubono
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  3. Ichiro Tsuji
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  4. Shoko Komatsu
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  5. Seiki Kanemura
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  6. Haruo Nakatsuka
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  7. Akira Fukao
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  8. Hiroshi Satoh
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  9. Shigeru Hisamichi
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Nishino, Y., Tsubono, Y., Tsuji, I. et al. Passive smoking at home and cancer risk: a population-based prospective study in Japanese nonsmoking women. Cancer Causes Control 12, 797–802 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012273806199

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012273806199

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