WOMEN are more likely than men to get hooked on cigarettes, an analysis of
more than 22,000 US smokers has revealed. This may help explain last week鈥檚 grim
news that lung cancer now kills more women in Britain than breast cancer.
The latest study, by Denise Kandel and her colleagues at the New York State
Psychiatric Institute, showed that women become dependent on nicotine more
easily than men do. The upshot is that women are quicker to pick up the habit of
smoking鈥攁nd find it harder to quit.
鈥淚f you compare men and women for the same dose of nicotine, women report
higher symptoms of dependence, and women are more likely to remain smokers,鈥�
says Kandel.
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She examined interviews with 22,292 smokers, conducted between 1991 and 1993
as part of the US National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. She found that
women鈥攁long with adolescents and white people鈥攚ere more vulnerable
to smoking-addiction than men, older people and non-white people.
She measured the degree of addiction by scoring each person on six factors.
These included the intensity of withdrawal symptoms, the tendency to smoke more
than intended, the number of failed attempts to cut down, and the build-up of
tolerance鈥攖he need to smoke progressively more to get the same buzz.
More experiments are needed, she believes, to find out if physiology accounts
for the differences. 鈥淏lack people are known to metabolise nicotine more
slowly,鈥� says Kandel. This may mean that cravings don鈥檛 return as fast as they
would in people who clear the drug faster, she says.
Smoking has been in decline for many years in the US, but more women than men
now smoke. And more adolescents are taking up the habit.
Figures released last week by the Cancer Research Campaign in Britain show
that 12,765 women died of lung cancer in 1999, 88 more than died of breast
cancer. And while deaths from breast cancer have declined by 5 per cent over the
past two decades, lung cancer deaths in women have risen by 36 per cent.
鈥淲e know that women are a particularly vulnerable group,鈥� says Jean King,
director of education at the CRC. 鈥淭he increased susceptibility to dependence
may be a contributory factor, but we need to understand better how we can
support these vulnerable groups through to cessation.鈥�