In eight European and Scandinavian countries, 270,000 people are diagnosed every year with cancers caused by smoking, according to a European study.
Smoking is known to be a major contributor to a variety of cancers, including lung, colon and bladder cancers, and understanding how great the burden of smoking is on cancer rates is important for developing prevention strategies, said Antonio Agudo, the lead author of the study.
"These results tell us that the contribution of tobacco smoking to cancer is substantial, and that, in spite of substantial efforts put forward to reduce smoking in European countries, the overwhelming importance of cigarette smoking on cancer risk is still of public health concern, and a priority from the point of view of prevention," said Agudo, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncology in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain.
He and his colleagues, as part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), gathered information on more than 440,000 residents of Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Nearly 4,500 people were diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, about 3,000 with lung cancer and 1,850 with lower urinary tract cancer.