Quitting Smoking Isn't Easy, but Comes With Major Benefits
- Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, 54, reportedly “hates” her husband Ben Affleck’s smoking habit. She’s also not a fan of products he’s used to attempt to quit — like nicotine gum.
- Heavy smokers like Affleck are ideal candidates for new lung cancer screening guidelines. The guidelines were published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians and call for annual lung cancer screening for people aged 50 to 80 years old if they are heavy smokers with roughly 20 years of smoking history.
- Lung cancer screening is painless and lasts only a few minutes. It involves using a low-dose computed tomography (LDCT). While lying on a table, an X-ray will scan your lungs for anything unusual, such as a shadow over the lungs.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says cigarette smoking is linked to about 80 to 90 percent of lung cancer deaths.
Old habits are hard to break, and this is true even for actor Ben Affleck, 51, who is known to be a heavy smoker. Although he reportedly tries to quit, his methods still prove nerve-wracking for his famous wife, Jennifer Lopez, 54.
Recent photos are making the rounds of Affleck driving Lopez around in their luxurious Rolls-Royce. In the photos, the “Argo” actor is puffing away with a cigarette in his mouth as Lopez looks on from the passenger seat.
Read More“Ben only smokes outside and away from Jen, and he’s cut down a lot on his habit by using nicotine gum, but he admits she hates chewing gum as much as she hates smoking,” the friend added.
Affleck’s long history of smoking makes him the ideal candidate to receive annual lung cancer screening. The American Cancer Society (ACS) recently released new lung cancer screening guidelines explicitly aimed at heavy smokers.
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“This updated guideline continues a trend of expanding eligibility for lung cancer screening in a way that will result in many more deaths prevented by expanding the eligibility criteria for screening to detect lung cancer early,” said Dr. Robert Smith, senior vice president, early cancer detection science at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the lung cancer screening guideline report.
Lung cancer screening is painless and lasts only a few minutes. It involves using a low-dose computed tomography (LDCT). While lying on a table, an X-ray will scan your lungs for anything unusual, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains.
Understanding Lung Cancer Risk
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths for men and women in the United States. Non-smokers still get lung cancer, but cigarette smoking is the number one risk factor for the disease. Tobacco smoke contains a mixture of more than 7,000 different chemicals, at least 70 of which are known to cause cancer, the CDC says.
Helping You Understand Wide-ranging Impacts of Smoking
- 95% of Smokers Take Up the Habit Before Age 21: Why New York Just Joined A Growing List of States that Have Raised the Legal Smoking Age
- Cigarette Sales Increase for the First Time in 20 Years On the Heels Of Lung Cancer Awareness Month; Understand the Risk of Smoking
- Do You Need Some Motivation To Quit Smoking? Smokers Who Quit By 45 Reduce Their Excess Lung Cancer Risk by 87%, Research Shows
- Does Smoking Marijuana Cause Lung Cancer?
- New Study Finds Vaping Causes the Same Changes to DNA as Smoking Cigarettes
The CDC says cigarette smoking is linked to about 80 to 90 percent of lung cancer deaths, and people who smoke cigarettes are 15 to 30 times more likely to get lung cancer or die from lung cancer than people who don’t smoke. Additionally, second-hand smoke can cause lung cancer.
Smoking is, of course, the primary cause of lung cancer, but nonsmokers can and do develop this disease. Researchers have made progress in understanding the differences between lung cancer in smokers versus nonsmokers, says Dr. Ronald Natale, a medical oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and they’re developing targeted treatments that will be able to address the genetic drivers of lung cancer in nonsmokers.
WATCH: Smokers vs. Non-smokers and lung cancer
“Among patients who are nonsmokers, or former very light smokers, we identify a mutation that we can target with pills in about 60% to 70% of them. That leaves 30% or so, 40%, in whom we either have a target for which we do not have successful treatment,” Dr. Ronald Natale, a medical oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, tells SurvivorNet.
“Among patients who are smokers, who have more complex cancers that have hundreds, sometimes thousands of mutations, don’t have a driver mutation that we can give a pill for, which is only a tiny percentage of lifelong smokers. Chemotherapy is the primary treatment in most patients,” Dr. Natale explains further.
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