Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

  Vidcast:  https://youtu.be/QcYjVj1fdmU   North Carolina oncologists report that former or current cigarette smokers are significantly more likely to suffer breast cancer lung metastases compared with non-smokers.  To find out why, they went into the lab and found, in a mouse model, that nicotine is the culprit.   In their human study group of 1077 breast cancer patients, the group of tobacco smokers had a 13% higher incidence of metastases.  To study the role of nicotine, they injected nicotine into mice previously given a mouse breast cancer.     The result: the nicotine injections increased the animals’ metastatic burden 100-fold.  The reason: nicotine triggers pro-tumor white cell activity that allows tumor cells to colonize distant tissues.   https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20733-9   #breastcancer #metastasis #nicotine