Smoking addiction could be inherited

A genetic link that makes people more susceptible to tobacco addiction, causing them to smoke more and have a greater risk of lung cancer, has been identified by scientists.

The discovery by three separate teams makes the strongest case so far for the biological link to smoking and sheds light on how genetics and cigarettes join forces to cause cancer, experts said.

The findings could also lead to new anti-smoking treatments.

“This is kind of a double whammy gene,” said Christopher Amos, a professor of epidemiology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and author of one of the studies. “It also makes you more likely to be dependent on smoking and less likely to quit smoking.”

A smoker who inherits the genetic variation from both parents has an 80% greater chance of lung cancer than a smoker without the variants, the researchers reported.

On average they have two extra cigarettes a day and a much harder time quitting than smokers who do not have these genetic differences.

The three studies, funded by governments in the US and Europe, is being published tomorrow in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics.

The scientists surveyed genetic markers in more than 35,000 people in Europe, Canada and the United States, zeroing in on the same set of genetic differences.

They are not quite sure if what they found is a set of variations in one gene or in three closely connected genes. But they said the result is the same: These genetic quirks increase the risk of addiction and lung cancer.

The studies’ authors disagreed on whether the set of variants directly increased the risk of lung cancer or did so indirectly by causing more smoking that led to the cancer.

The genetic variations could eventually help explain some of the mysteries of chain smoking, nicotine addiction and lung cancer that cannot be explained as environmental factors, brain biology and statistics, experts said.

These oddities include why there are 100-year-old smokers who don’t get cancer and people who light up an occasional cigarette and do not get hooked.

The new studies point to surprising areas of the genes not associated with pleasure and addiction rewards. That may help explain why people have trouble quitting, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which funded one of the studies. Eventual testing for the genetic variants could lead to custom treatments for quitting smoking.

The studies mostly looked at smokers and ex-smokers – although two of the studies also looked at several hundred non-smokers. The research only involved white people of European descent. People of Asian and African descent will be studied soon and may yield different results, scientists said. Smoking-related diseases worldwide kill about one in 10 adults, according to the World Health Organisation.

The studies show on average the consequences of the set of variations in the alphabet of genetic code that people inherit from each parent:

::Smokers who get the set of variants from only one parent have a risk of lung cancer about one-third higher than people without any variants. They also smoke about one more cigarette a day on average than other smokers. This group makes up about 45% of the population studied.

::Smokers who inherit the variants from both parents have almost a one in four chance of developing lung cancer. Their risk is between 70 and 80% higher than the cancer risk of other smokers without the genetic variants. They smoke on average of two extra cigarettes a day, and have a 45% higher risk of peripheral artery disease. This group accounts for about one in nine people of European descent.

::Smokers who do not have the variants are still more than 10 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers. Smokers without the variant overall have about a 14% risk of getting lung cancer. By comparison the risk of lung cancer for people who have never smoked is less than 1%.