Air pollution, just as "second hand" smoke, is way overblown as a risk factor for lung cancer. Nothing compares, not even close, to sending foreign particles, the end results of combustion, straight to your lungs, like smokers do. The result of years and years of this sludge accumulating on your alveoli is going to be bad, you don't have to be oncologist to see it. And that's why I always tell my pot head friends to beware of what will happen to their lungs 20, 30 years from now. "Muh, it's a natural plant!!!" If you burn it and send the results of the combustion to your lungs on a daily basis, good luck. I don't know about vaping, but in my opinion, if it's not air, pure and simple air, it should not be entering your lungs. Vaping probably is orders of magnitude safer than smoking, but who knows. We never know what we don't know before it happens.
So… something like 5-10 µg/m³ PM 2.5 for most of the year, with rare spikes up to 30 µg/m³ for short periods of time.
If that's your definition of air pollution, then sure. One cigarette a year will probably do more damage to you than that.
I live in a really polluted place, with yearly PM 2.5 average of ~100 µg/m³ (daily mean of hundreds of micrograms per m³ in winter, and short spikes up to 1500 µg/m³ for hours at a time), and high levels of toxic gases (SO₂, NO₂, H₂S, HCl, HF, and a few others).
Literally everyone here suffers from chronic bronchitis, including myself. (Never smoked.) Deaths from lung cancer and COPD among non-smokers are commonplace. I don't have the exact statistics (the government doesn't publish absolute numbers), but incidence of lung cancer is claimed to be around 3× the national average (which is already bad compared to developed countries).
I believe it's also pretty bad in industrial Chinese cities, although they have so much smoking population it's difficult to differentiate.
Yup, and it's getting worse. This is largely driven by drought and the dessication of the Great Salt Lake. The dust pulled off the basin is also toxic due to heavy metals (most notably arsenic), industrial and agricultural runoff, and the remnants of algal blooms. Here's one recent article covering the topic: https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2022/6/29/23188005/opinion-t...
This is literally the answer. My brother's a data scientist at a large health insurance company and this is a subject we've discussed at length. In short, because of the large Mormon population in Utah, the state has shockingly good statistics on a very wide range of disease incidences, health-related quality of life outcome measures, etc. With respect to health and longevity, it pays not to drink, smoke, or do drugs (surprise, surprise).
Other interesting tidbit – his health insurance company (and I expect all others) took a substantial hit 2019-2020 from the initial phase of the pandemic. Come 2021-2022, large proportions of the unhealthiest segments of the population had passed away; covid + comorbidities puts you at a much greater risk of dying than covid alone. They integrated this fact into their modeling and, given that these people would no longer require care (e.g. dialysis, ER visits), predicted that utilization would go down substantially and, now providing for an overall healthier population, the company would be more profitable that year relative to pre-pandemic years. This turned out to be an accurate prediction.
I mean smoking is a factor, sure...but that doesn't explain why NM, who has a highish average smoking rate, is near the bottom. Same for how AL, who has a high smoking rate, is middle of the pack.
"Conclusion
Hispanic ethnicity was associated with better survival in NSCLC. This survival advantage is likely the result of complex interactions amongst several physical, social, cultural, genomic, and environmental factors."
Living in a country that has a lot of natural radon in some places, very definitely yes. New houses over here must be built in a way that mitigates radon exposure, unless that particular region is low-risk.
At risk of going wildly off topic from the post, I’d suggest that for anybody with disposable income, the value proposition of buying some air quality sensors is amazing.
I installed some a month or two ago, and they caught alarmingly high radon levels in my basement that I’m now working to address. But also they catch more mundane things, like “oh, I tend to get headaches in the afternoon, which happens to be when the co2 levels are super high in my office”.
I’ve been happy so far with Airthings. They have a variety of sensors with different price points / features (seems like most except the Mini will do radon), the mobile app is decent, and there’s a HomeAssistant integration for it.
That map makes it looks like the borders of Missouri were decided based on radon risk. Which is not what I think actually happened when they drew those borders.
The granularity of the map seems to be at the county level, so I will guess that the EPA did not gather this data by itself, but rather, rely on self-reported data from each county from each state. A county is a political boundary, so the state of Missouri probably had different testing regulations and methodologies than its neighbors like Iowa and Illinois.
>> so the state of Missouri probably had different testing regulations and methodologies than its neighbors like Iowa and Illinois
Then the map doesn't show risk of radon. It's worthless for that purpose.
"Different political institutions have different standards for what is a radon risk."
It's a map of different political institutions then. That's fine. Just don't try to sell a map of political institutions as a map of radon risk when that is obvious bullshit. I mean it's completely obvious from the boundary.
Radon Risk is well established. If it’s higher than a specific limit you need to mitigate. This map just indicates where it is likely to be higher on average based on geology.
I've read that vitamin D can play a role in cancer prevention at a cellular level. Our bodies synthesize vitamin D using UVB in sunlight. You'll notice that most of the states at the bottom of the list (except DC ?!?) are sunny places, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is a contributing factor.
It's interesting to me that Kentucky and West Virginia have approximately same percentage of adult smokers. So although obviously cigarettes are the most likely factor by an overwhelming amount, there's probably more contributing factors leading to the differences.
> Variations in medical care among states may also result in differences in cancer rates. In states where higher percentages of people participate in cancer screenings, more cancers are diagnosed early when the prognosis is often better.
It seems like this data could be impacted such that better healthcare would result in worse cancer rate, since this study naturally counts know cancer rates. That is, it would not necessarily result in literally more incidents of cancer, just the rate as measured.
I would think that if lung cancer goes undiagnosed, it will eventually kill the patient, at which point it would be recorded as a lung cancer case. So I wouldn't expect cancer screening to bias measurement.
Would people who die from metastasized lung cancer not be recorded as having had lung cancer?
I don't know the answer but my guess is that the majority of deaths do not have an autopsy performed, especially in 65+ age range.
Edit -- I looked it up, sounds like ~7% of US deaths have an autopsy currently, so I'd guess that the data is influenced by healthcare quality (I didn't read it, perhaps they try to control for that?).
I posted this article because “In Utah more people die from lung cancer than from any other cancer” is true, while “Utah has the lowest rate of lung cancer among all states” is also true.
At a glance, it appears that lung cancer incidence is somewhat negatively correlated with elevation. Perhaps higher elevation enhances lung health, contributing to the results here.
Having lived in both Utah and Colorado, and spent time in other high elevation states, I'd say that it is not about the elevation directly, but that elevation tends to exist because of mountains. Mountains draw active, younger people who enjoy outdoor activity. And that demographic does not tend to smoke.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadThere are also a lot of morms in Idaho, I was surprised to see how much higher the rates are.
Provo lies in the middle of a basin, surrounded by huge mountains that create a trap for smog inversion layers.
You'd need data to know, not my anecdata :)
https://aqicn.org/city/utah/salt-lake-city/
So… something like 5-10 µg/m³ PM 2.5 for most of the year, with rare spikes up to 30 µg/m³ for short periods of time.
If that's your definition of air pollution, then sure. One cigarette a year will probably do more damage to you than that.
I live in a really polluted place, with yearly PM 2.5 average of ~100 µg/m³ (daily mean of hundreds of micrograms per m³ in winter, and short spikes up to 1500 µg/m³ for hours at a time), and high levels of toxic gases (SO₂, NO₂, H₂S, HCl, HF, and a few others).
Literally everyone here suffers from chronic bronchitis, including myself. (Never smoked.) Deaths from lung cancer and COPD among non-smokers are commonplace. I don't have the exact statistics (the government doesn't publish absolute numbers), but incidence of lung cancer is claimed to be around 3× the national average (which is already bad compared to developed countries).
I believe it's also pretty bad in industrial Chinese cities, although they have so much smoking population it's difficult to differentiate.
Other interesting tidbit – his health insurance company (and I expect all others) took a substantial hit 2019-2020 from the initial phase of the pandemic. Come 2021-2022, large proportions of the unhealthiest segments of the population had passed away; covid + comorbidities puts you at a much greater risk of dying than covid alone. They integrated this fact into their modeling and, given that these people would no longer require care (e.g. dialysis, ER visits), predicted that utilization would go down substantially and, now providing for an overall healthier population, the company would be more profitable that year relative to pre-pandemic years. This turned out to be an accurate prediction.
Well put, these things are always complex.
I installed some a month or two ago, and they caught alarmingly high radon levels in my basement that I’m now working to address. But also they catch more mundane things, like “oh, I tend to get headaches in the afternoon, which happens to be when the co2 levels are super high in my office”.
Given that lung cancer is driven by a) smoking, then b) radon, one would expect some level of correlation here.
So, no, don't believe your map.
Then the map doesn't show risk of radon. It's worthless for that purpose.
"Different political institutions have different standards for what is a radon risk."
It's a map of different political institutions then. That's fine. Just don't try to sell a map of political institutions as a map of radon risk when that is obvious bullshit. I mean it's completely obvious from the boundary.
100% obvious bullshit.
https://www.cdc.gov/statesystem/cigaretteuseadult.html
> Variations in medical care among states may also result in differences in cancer rates. In states where higher percentages of people participate in cancer screenings, more cancers are diagnosed early when the prognosis is often better.
It seems like this data could be impacted such that better healthcare would result in worse cancer rate, since this study naturally counts know cancer rates. That is, it would not necessarily result in literally more incidents of cancer, just the rate as measured.
Would people who die from metastasized lung cancer not be recorded as having had lung cancer?
I don't know the answer but my guess is that the majority of deaths do not have an autopsy performed, especially in 65+ age range.
Edit -- I looked it up, sounds like ~7% of US deaths have an autopsy currently, so I'd guess that the data is influenced by healthcare quality (I didn't read it, perhaps they try to control for that?).