Most smokers with bladder cancer know tobacco was the cause

More than half of bladder cancers in the U.S. are the result of smoking, and 90 percent of smokers with the disease are aware of the connection, according to a new study.

“Bladder cancer is actually the second most common smoking-related cancer, second only to lung,” said lead author Dr. Jeffrey C. Bassett of Kaiser Permanente Southern California in Anaheim.

Although previous studies had suggested that few people understood the connection between bladder cancer and tobacco, this new study found the opposite, he said.

“Bladder cancer patients smoking at diagnosis appear to accept that their own smoking caused their cancer, positioning them for a more motivated (and more likely successful) attempt at quitting,” Bassett said.

He and his team surveyed 1,198 men and women who had been diagnosed with bladder cancer between 2006 and 2009 in the California Cancer Registry about their smoking history, and 790 completed the survey.

About half were former smokers, and many had quit at least 10 years before their cancer diagnosis.

Nineteen percent of the patients were current smokers. They were more often younger, less educated and single compared to former or never smokers.

The surveys contained a list of ten potential causes of bladder cancer, like tobacco use, alcohol, age, family history and sexually transmitted disease, and asked respondents to identify those that could cause cancer, and later to identify which caused their own cancer based on what they knew.

Almost 70 percent of respondents said tobacco could cause cancer, making it the most cited cause in the survey. Next most common were alcohol and age.

Ten percent of current smokers said smoking did not cause bladder cancer, and 16 percent said it had not been the cause of their own cancer, according to results in Cancer.

Current and former smokers most often attributed their cancer to tobacco. They cited urologists as the most common source of information about the link.

More than 12 million new cases of bladder cancer occur annually worldwide, making it the seventh most common cancer for men and seventeenth for women, according to a review paper in 2009 in the World Journal of Urology.

The disease is three to four times more common in developed countries and 90 percent of cancers are diagnosed past the age of 55. CONTINUE READING