First Steps

Burning questions
(continued)

In her first project on the subject - a case control study funded by the American Cancer Society and UC Davis - Murin compared 87 women with invasive breast cancer that had spread to the lungs (the "case" group) with 174 women with breast cancer that had not metastasized (the "control" group). Each was matched up by year of diagnosis, age at diagnosis, size of primary tumor and whether cancer was found in the lymph nodes.

In research that is pending publication, Murin and John Iniardi, a UC Davis Medical Center statistician, found that women who smoked were twice as likely as nonsmokers to have breast cancer that metastasized to the lungs.

For her next project, Murin will collaborate with the Harvard School of Public Health and use data from the Nurses' Health Study to see what role smoking plays in breast cancer mortality.

The Nurses' Health Study is one of the longest, largest and most detailed health surveys in existence in the United States. It was first initiated at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston in 1976, when 121,700 women registered nurses from 11 states completed detailed questionnaires about known and suspected risk factors for cancer and cardiovascular disease, including smoking. Every two years participants submit follow-up surveys. Of this group, some 5,373 have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Information culled from the Nurses' Health Study has proven enormously valuable to health researchers. This study was one of the first to show no relationship between smoking and an increased risk of breast cancer. It also revealed a surprising lack of connection between a low-fat diet and a reduced risk of breast cancer. This year, numbers crunched from the database failed to show a connection between a high-fiber diet and prevention of colon cancer.