Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 9, 1994 TAG: 9402090213
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
And white women born during the same years - 1948 through 1957 - are 30 percent more likely to develop cancers unrelated to smoking than were their grandmothers, the researchers reported in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
During a 15-year period ending in 1987, death rates from heart disease dropped 42 percent in people up to age 55 and 33 percent among 55- to 84-year-olds, the study found.
But the incidence of cancer is up among all ages, and researchers speculated that environmental exposure to cancer-causing substances other than cigarettes may be partly to blame.
The study was led by Devra Lee Davis, a senior adviser to the assistant health secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Smoking-related cancers are up 15 percent in the male baby boomers compared with their grandfathers, the study found. For women baby boomers, smoking-related malignancies are 500 percent higher than for their grandmothers.
An independent researcher, Dr. Clark W. Heath, vice president for epidemiology and statistics with the American Cancer Society, expressed caution about the findings.
``It's not very easy to compare trends in cancer mortality from one era to another when the population-age structure has changed, and smoking patterns have changed,'' he said.
A 10 percent sample of the population across nine regions of the country was studied. The study involved only whites because statistics on other races were not complete enough to be reliable, Davis said.
Researchers who studied 837,000 cancer cases in Sweden last year reported similar trends there, Davis said.
One clue to what is behind them may lie with cancer rates among farmers, Davis said.
``The same types of tumors that farmers are dying of also are increasing in men of the baby boom generation,'' Davis said.
Farmers are more vigorous and smoke less than most people, and suffer less heart disease and lung cancer, she said. But farmers die more often of prostate cancer, brain cancer, bone cancer and skin cancer and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, she said. That could be linked to their chronic contact with engine exhausts, solvents, animal viruses, sunlight and fuels, she said.
Another outside researcher was skeptical.
Dr. Anthony B. Miller of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at the University of
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.