Lung cancer trends: smoking, obesity, and sex assessed in the Staten Island University’s lung cancer patients

Shilpi Gupta,1 Samer Hassan,1 Vijaya R Bhatt,2 Houssein Abdul Sater,1 Asma Dilawari31Hematology-Oncology, Staten Island University Hospital, Staten Island, NY, USA; 2Hematology-Oncology, Nebraska Medical Ctr, Omaha, NE, USA; 3Hematology-Oncology, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, Olney, Maryland, USAIntroduction: The incidence of lung cancer in the United States decreased by 1.8% from 1991 to 2005 while it increased by 0.5% in females. We assessed whether nonsmokers afflicted with lung cancer at Staten Island University Hospital are disproportionately female in comparison to national averages. We also evaluated different factors including race, histology, and body mass index (BMI) in correlation with smoking history.Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted from 2005 to 2011 on 857 patients. Patients were divided into two groups according to their smoking status: current or ever-smokers, and former or never-smokers. A chi-square test for categorical data and multivariate logistic regression analyses was used to study the relation between BMI and the other clinical and demographic data.Results: Forty-nine percent of patients were men and 51% were women with a mean age at diagnosis of 67.8 years. Current smokers were most common (50.2%) followed by ever-smokers (18.2%), former smokers (15.8%) and never-smokers (15.6%). Forty eight percent had stage IV lung cancer upon presentation. Never-smokers with lung cancer were 24 times more likely to be females. However, the proportion of female former smokers (31.6%) was lower than the proportion of male former smokers (68.4%) (P=0.001). There was no significant association between American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage, sex, race, and histological type in the two smoking groups. Current/ever-smokers tended to be younger at age of diagnosis (P=0.0003). BMI was lower in the current/ever-smokers (26.8 kg/m2) versus former/never-smokers (28.8) in males (P=0.0005). BMI was significantly higher in males (30.26) versus females (25.25) in the never-smoker category (P=0.004). Current smokers, compared to others, had a lower BMI in males (26.4 versus 28.3; P=0.0001) and females (25.5 versus 26.9; P=0.013) but the mean BMI for all groups was in the overweight/obese range.Conclusion: Our population of lung cancer patients although demographically distinct, reflects a similar proportion of afflicted nonsmokers to the national population. Smoking is a major risk factor for lung cancer, but there is also a possible direct correlation with BMI that would support obesity as a potential risk factor for lung cancer.Keywords: lung, cancer, smoking, obesity, BMI, Staten Islan

Genetic variability of hepatitis E virus within and between three epidemics in India

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is an important cause of epidemic and sporadic acute viral hepatitis in many developing countries, including India. We evaluated the genetic variability within two regions (a 476-nt long ORF1 segment and a 304-nt long ORF2 segment) from specimens collected during three outbreaks in the cities of Karnal (1987), Yamunanagar (1989), and Meerut (1996), India, and from one patient, residing in Lucknow, India, who had a case of sporadic hepatitis (1996). Within an outbreak, sequences in the ORF1 and ORF2 regions were 99.3–100.0% identical. However, when strains were compared between outbreaks, identity in the ORF1 and ORF2 region was 97.1–99.2 and 96.4–100.0%, respectively. A comparison of these sequences to previously published Indian ORF1 and ORF2 sequences revealed even lower similarities, 95.2–98.5 and 95.1–98.7%, respectively. One patient in the Meerut outbreak had genomic sequences that differed substantially from the other patients affected during this outbreak and probably reflected a sporadic infection. The sporadic hepatitis E strain from Lucknow clustered with a previously described HEV strain from a patient with fulminant hepatic failure (FHF). Our data suggest that the ORF1 and ORF2 segments can be used to study the molecular epidemiology of HEV infection and indicate that much remains to be determined about the genetic variability of Indian HEV strains