Smoking and cancer genetic link

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The discovery by three separate teams makes the strongest case so far for the biological link to smoking and sheds light on how genetics and cigarettes join forces to cause cancer, experts said. The findings could also lead to new anti-smoking treatments.

"This is kind of a double whammy gene," said Christopher Amos, a professor of epidemiology at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston and author of one of the studies. "It also makes you more likely to be dependent on smoking and less likely to quit smoking."

A smoker who inherits the genetic variation from both parents has an 80% greater chance of lung cancer than a smoker without the variants, the researchers reported.

On average they have two extra cigarettes a day and a much harder time quitting than smokers who do not have these genetic differences. The three studies, funded by governments in the US and Europe, is being published in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics.

The genetic variations could eventually help explain some of the mysteries of chain smoking, nicotine addiction and lung cancer that cannot be explained as environmental factors, brain biology and statistics, experts said.

These oddities include why there are 100-year-old smokers who don't get cancer and people who light up an occasional cigarette and do not get hooked.

The new studies point to surprising areas of the genes not associated with pleasure and addiction rewards. That may help explain why people have trouble quitting, said Dr Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which funded one of the studies. Eventual testing for the genetic variants could lead to custom treatments for quitting smoking.

The studies mostly looked at smokers and ex-smokers - although two of the studies also looked at several hundred non-smokers. The research only involved white people of European descent. People of Asian and African descent will be studied soon and may yield different results, scientists said.

Smoking-related diseases worldwide kill about one in 10 adults, according to the World Health Organisation.