Lung cancer, pollution can cause it in non-smokers. Scientists: “Human-related climate health”

L’air pollution can cause the lung cancer even in people who they don’t smoke. This is explained by researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London, funded by Cancer Research UK. Scholars stress that this risk is lower than that caused by smoking, but still very dangerous because “we have no control over what we all breathe”. During the presentation, which took place at the Congress of the European Society of Medical Oncologya mechanism by which micro polluting particles produced by vehicle exhausts and come on fossil fuels they can be harmful to all people. These particles are said to be responsible for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which causes more than 250,000 deaths worldwide each year.

“These new data link the importance of addressing the climatic health to the improvement of human health“, Argues the study coordinator Charles Swanton. According to the researcher, Il climate change it is then taken to the extreme by human activity and this has “a direct impact on human health through an important and previously overlooked carcinogenic mechanism in lung cells”. For the team that conducted the research, the link between pollution and lung cancer is not a new issue, but having one scientific demonstration imposes a change of behavior also at the level of preventionas well as “a strong mandate to address these problems, both for environmental and health reasons”.
The work starts from a study conducted in laboratory on mutations in the EGFR gene, present in about half of non-smokers affected by lung cancer. Exposure to high concentrations of airborne particulate matter has been linked to an increased risk of non-small cell lung cancer with the presence of EGFR gene mutations.