Urine Test Could Gauge Smokers Lung Cancer Risk

Jacksonville – Quit smoking. Easy to say but hard to do. So hard, in fact, that it is estimated about one out of every four adults in the United States is currently a smoker, despite all the evidence that this is one of the most dangerous behaviors for one’s health causing 400,000 deaths annually by cancer alone. But, that cancer is in the future so it doesn’t seem real. It is just too easy for smokers to delude themselves into thinking that they will be one of the lucky ones to evade the cancer bullet. But what if there were a simple, inexpensive test that could predict with a high degree of accuracy that an individual would be at a higher risk than most smokers to develop lung cancer?

Dr. Jian-Min Yuan, associate professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, hopes that just such a test will be available for screening smokers in a few years. He and his colleagues will be presenting results of their study at the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association for Cancer Research between April 18 and April 22, 2009. In this study, a male population of smokers submitted urine specimens. These were tested for levels of tobacco metabolites, specifically, the chemicals NNAL and cotinine. These were broken into three groups of high, medium and low levels. The population was followed for ten years at which time it was found that the group with the highest level of NNAL alone was twice as likely to develop lung cancer as the group with the lowest level. But, when both the chemicals NNAL and cotinine were present in the highest levels, this group showed fully 8.5 times the rate of lung cancer as the lowest level group.

If these findings are correct, then high levels of both NNAL and cotinine measured in a urine screen will be powerful predictors of future cancer risk. This may be just the sort of information at risk smokers need to overcome the delusional thinking so common among them. And, it may just save their lives!