Air pollution may promote the growth of lung cancer in people who have never smoked by activating normally inactive cells in the lung that harbor cancer-causing mutations, new research indicates.
Although smoking remains the chief risk factor for lung cancer, outdoor air pollution causes roughly 1 in 10 cases of lung cancer in the UK, according to Cancer Research UK. In 2019, about 300,000 lung cancer deaths around the world wereWhile the link between air pollution and lung cancer is well known, the mechanism that explains this link has been harder to pinpoint.
In the current study, Hill and colleagues proposed that, rather than act on DNA directly, air pollutants might promote inflammatory changes in the lung tissue that wake up inactive cancer-causing mutations, which accumulate naturally in these cells as people age. This idea lines up with a decades-old theory of cancer promotion, according to which tumorigenesis is a two-step process: the initial step induces mutations in healthy cells, after which a promoter step triggers cancer development.
Hill and colleagues analyzed data from over 400,000 people in three countries. They compared rates of-mutant lung cancer cases in areas with different levels of PM2.5 pollution. The team found a significant association between PM2.5 levels and the incidence of lung cancer for 32,957 EGFR-driven lung cancer cases in England, South Korea, and Taiwan.
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