Observational Lung Cancer Study

Hi, I’m Dr. Branyon with New Hope Unlimited. Thanks for joining me for the next few minutes.

I came across a study that I thought was pretty interesting having to do with the lungs and lung cancer. It’s called an observational study and that means that researchers would take groups of people and would observe “observational” — observe the effect of a risk factor, or it could be a treatment, a diagnostic test, or something that has to do without trying to change who is or isn’t exposed, and how it will change their life.

This is a study that comes out of Shanghai. (And it’s an easy one for me to pronounce. Because I can say the word Shanghai. Lot of these studies come from universities and medical groups that I have problems with mentioning the names because I don’t want to disrespect anybody, but some of the names are hard. So this one I have fun with.) And it comes from two groups that got together. It’s the Shanghai Women’s Health Study and the Shanghai Men’s Health Study. They came together. And they published this study in a journal called Thorax. Thorax happens to be what is up in the chest. And this study is in the chest, and it is about the lung.

So they took two groups of males and females combined. And in one group, they called it the lifetime non-smokers. And then the other group, they called it the smokers. Didn’t say if it was lifetime smokers, or how long that was, so I can’t give you that information. But they started this group in 1996 and ended it in 2006. Just hearing about it now, but hey, better late than never. So what they did, they would take each group, each person rather. And they investigated their lifestyle, their history, health history, their family history, their diet, their workplace, their environment, everything that made up that person  because they wanted a healthy person to start with. Then they would have them to come in and they would rinse out their mouth. And then they would swab their mouth put under the microscope to swab gatherings. And what they were looking for was the different types of bacteria. We have all kinds of bacteria in our mouths, some good and some bad. It’s better to have a mouth full of good bacteria, believe me. But they would look and they were looking for what in the smoking section or non-smoking section as to which bacterias would be presented.

Well, what happened at the end of the story, they found that in the smoker’ group, after those 10 years, those smokers out those groups, 90 women came up with lung cancer, they acquired lung cancer while smoking within those 10 years. 26 males in the smoking group came up with lung cancer in those 10 years. Now add up the lifetime non-smokers, the same amount of people in each group, not one person came up with lung cancer.

So what can we bring to the table with that information? Pretty simple. I see two things. It is definitely better not to smoke. Your chances of lung cancer is less acquiring it if you’re a nonsmoker, especially if you don’t have a family history. And then the other as far as the smokers go, it seemed like more women, after all, 90 women got it and 26 men didn’t. So that’s pretty interesting. Now I’m going to add a third thing, the bacteria in our mouths. For years, we have known and heard about how bad teeth,bad gums can hurt our health. It can cause heart problems, high blood pressure, stroke, it can help the immune system not to work near as good because the immune system’s in the mouth is trying to fight everything that’s there that shouldn’t be to get us through it. So I wanted to say that just even this study, even though it was about smoking, and the risk factors for smoking. Once again, it’s observational, so we can pull observation from that. Bad bacteria that you can get out of smoking can not only hurt you, and harm you, in many ways, but keeping our teeth or gums healthy, can help us also. Well, I think that’s a good observational study. And I think we should just use it for cancer prevention.

It’s very important in our lifestyles that we have now, just the environment is not as clean as it used to be for great grandmothers and fathers and, and our grandparents and even our parents. Every day, our environment gets a little worse. So it’s very important to do as much as you can to prevent the cancer. But even if you’ve got the cancer, still cancer prevention goes a long way to getting you out of that predicament

I hope you enjoyed that. And I want you to have you — help you have a wonderful day. And I just want to say… get out of the bad drama that so much is around us right now. Think as much good thoughts as you possibly can. Love you all. See you on the next go around.