Learning Your Susceptibility to Lung Cancer

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center recently completed a study involving more than 500 smokers. The smokers were asked if they would be willing to donate a blood sample in return for learning if they had a genetic marker indicating their susceptibility to lung cancer and whether such knowledge would have any effect on smoking behavior. Lead researcher Colleen McBride says the results could also have implications for medical ethics:

"Surprisingly, 85 percent of the smokers who were approached agreed to have their blood tested. They wanted to know, and that's important information for us to know. It does look like getting the test information made them more interested in other information about smoking cessation."

McBride says smokers who find out they have a genetic marker disposing them to lung cancer can do something about it -- they can quit smoking. Others, however, could learn they have a marker for a disease for which there is no treatment or cure, which presents a different set of ethical questions. I'm Tom Britt.

McBride says one complication of the study was that some smokers who learned they did not have the genetic marker for lung cancer assumed they could continue smoking without consequence, until they were educated concerning genetics research.

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"Any one marker gives you a very small piece of information that has to be nested in a bunch of other considerations. Markers that we have for lung cancer only tell us about lung cancer. They don't tell us about heart disease, and we know that smokers are at greater risk for heart disease. They don't tell us about other cancers, and we know smokers are at risk for a lot of those, too."