The Canadian Lung Association today congratulated Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and all Parliamentarians on the passage of Bill C-32, an Act to Amend the federal Tobacco Act. The passage of the Act is a key win in the fight against smoking and the tobacco industry. [More]

Cancer Research UK funded scientists have confirmed that inherited changes in certain regions of the genome can increase a smokers' risk of developing lung cancer lung cancer, and determine the type of lung cancer that develops. Their results were published in this week's edition of the journal Cancer Research*. [More]

Chronic inflammatory lung diseases like chronic bronchitis and emphysema are a major global health problem, and the fourth leading cause of death and disability in developed countries, with smoking accounting for 90% of the risk for developing them. [More]

China Daily explores how a new anti-smoking initiative in China targets the country's medical professionals. According to the newspaper, "China is the world's largest tobacco producer and consumer," with "350 million smokers, plus 450 million people exposed to second-hand smoke." Annually, 1 million deaths are smoking-related, according to China's Ministry of Health. [More]

A new study - designed to understand why people smoke and help develop more effective quitting programmes for smokers - has revealed that only half of smokers say enjoyment and coping with stress were reasons why they smoke. The new Cancer Research UK study is published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research* today (Wednesday). [More]

A large meta-analysis, published in the open access journal BMC Medicine, has shown that snuff as used in Scandinavia has no discernible effect on the risk of various cancers. Products used in the past in the USA may have increased the risk, but any effect that exists now seems likely to be quite small. [More]

Smoking has once again been implicated in the development of advanced cancer. Exposure to nicotine by way of cigarette smoking may increase the likelihood that pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma will become metastatic, according to researchers from the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson. [More]

Secondhand smoke (SHS) is not only a nuisance, but a potential health concern for many college students, and administrators should be taking steps to reduce students' exposure, according to a new study by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. [More]

A unique study looking at the difference in cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke) and life expectancy between people of high and low socio-economic status has found that a person's IQ may have a role to play. [More]

A survey of staff at Addenbrooke's hospital has shown that those who break the smoke-free policy are generally more addicted than those who respect it. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health also investigated staff's attitude to the smoke-free policy and found that smokers were less likely to believe that the policy would protect people from second hand smoke. [More]

A new report by Access Economics has revealed that this year 80,000 Australians can expect to be treated in hospital for heart attacks or chest pain - at a cost to the economy of $18 billion and 10,000 people will die from a heart attack. [More]

Tobacco acts as a precipitating factor for headaches, specifically migraines. This is indicated in a study which shows that smokers have more migraine attacks and that smoking more than five cigarettes a day triggers this headache. The work has appeared in The Journal of Headache and Pain. [More]

Although alcohol consumption is known to be associated with chronic pancreatitis, new evidence indicates that a threshold of five or more drinks per day is required to significantly raise risk; however, most patients with chronic pancreatitis do not drink this amount, according to a report in the June 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine. In addition, smoking is an independent, dose-dependent risk factor. [More]

Each year, worldwide around one million new cases of bowel (colorectal) cancer are diagnosed and more than half a million people die from the disease. [More]

In a groundbreaking study researchers have concluded that evidence of the cause of "lacunar stroke" can be found by looking at the back of a patient's eyes. [More]