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Devra Lee Davis, PhD, MPH
US Department of Health and Human Services Washington, DC

Gregg E. Dinse, ScD
National Institute of Environment Health Sciences Research Triangle Park, NC

David G. Hoel, PhD
Medical University of South Carolina Charleston

JAMA. 1994;272(3):199-200.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—Efforts to find simple explanations for complex patterns are commendable. Dr Lemon carries Ockam's razor to an untenable extreme, however, when asserting that increased cancer risks are caused entirely by active and passive smoking. Like all disease, cancer has multiple causes. Only crude analyses that classified cancer sites, not individual cases, as related or unrelated to smoking were possible. In addition to lung and oral cancers, Lemon and others suggested that the smoking-related category should include pancreas, kidney, blasder, and colon. The Table indicates that even after reclassifying cancer sites, men born from 1948 to 1957 had three to four times the risk of developing cancers unrelated to smoking, and women had a 30% to 40% greater risk than their grandparents

had at the same ages. The cancer sites in this new nonsmoking category exhibiting increased risks are brain, breast, lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate.

Lemon speculates that all . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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