Healthy cells in lungs can repair the damage from smoking
pharmafile | January 30, 2020 | News story | Business Services | Cancer smoking, cigarettes, lung cancer, lungs, smoking
Human lungs have the ‘magical’ ability to repair the cancerous mutations caused by smoking cigarettes, but only if people quit smoking.
The findings were published in Nature and showed that the few cells that escape damage in a smoker can repair the lungs. The effect has been seen in patients that smoked a pack a day for 40 years before giving up. Previously the mutations that lead to lung cancer from smoking were considered to be permanent damage.
Peter Campbell, of the UK-based Wellcome Sanger Institute and the study’s joint senior author, said: “People who have smoked heavily for 30, 40 or more years often say to me that it’s too late to stop smoking – the damage is already done. What is so exciting about our study is that it shows that it’s never too late to quit. Within a few years of quitting, many of the cells lining their airways showed no evidence of damage from tobacco.”
The study analysed lung biopsies from 16 people including current smokers, ex-smokers, non-smokers and children and looked for the mutations that caused cancer. In 9 out of every 10 smokers, the lung cells had mutations including ones that caused cancer, but comparatively ex-smokers saw their damaged cells replaced by healthy ones. 40% of the total lung cells in ex-smokers were healthy, four times more than smokers.
Gerd Pfeifer, Professor at the Van Andel Institute’s Center for Epigenetics, praised the study and said: “It has shed light on how the protective effect of smoking cessation plays out at the molecular level in human lung tissue.”
Conor Kavanagh
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