According to a new study by UC Davis Cancer Center researchers, such disparities between genders and Asian and Pacific Islander ethnic groups can be explained almost entirely by tobacco smoke exposure suggesting that if smoking were eliminated, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans all would have very low cancer mortality rates, with minimal variation from group to group.
"Among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, non-lung cancer death rates, like lung cancer death rates, correlate very closely with their smoke exposures," said Bruce N. Leistikow, associate professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and a leading expert on the epidemiology of smoking-related illnesses. "If all Asian and Pacific Islander Americans had as little smoke exposure as South Asian females in California, our work suggests that their cancer mortality rates across the board could be as low as that of the South Asian females."
South Asian females in California had a cancer mortality rate of 58 deaths per 100,000 people per year. The cancer mortality for the United States as a whole was 193.5.
The UC Davis study appears online ahead of print in Preventive Medicine at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00917435 (select "Articles in Press"). It provides the first published evidence of associations between smoke exposure and non-lung cancer mortality in Asian and Pacific Islander Americans. These associations held up across California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, states that are home to 63 percent of the total Asian and Pacific Islander population in the United States. The associations also held up across Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Vi
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Contact: Claudia Morain
claudia.morain@ucdmc.ucdavis.edu
916-734-9023
University of California, Davis - Health System
17-Apr-2006