Relation between smoking or narcotics abuse and therecurrence of breast cancer in patients referred to an oncologyclinic in Mashhad

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women in the world with different risk factors including smoking. The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between smoking or narcotics abuse and recurrence in breast cancer patients referred to an oncology clinic in Mashhad. Medical records of 840 breast cancer patients (F=827 & M=13), whom referred to an oncology clinic in Mashhad were studied and data on age, sex, type of cancer, tumour size, recurrence and use of narcotics and smoking status were collected and analysed using SPSS version 21 software. The mean age of patients was 49.73±0.425 y. The most frequent type was Invasive ductal carcinoma (94%) and the least frequent (0.1%) was high grade large cell lymphoma. 13.8% of the patients were smokers (11.2% cigarettes, 49.1% tobacco) and 39.6% had also addiction to narcotics. The statistical analysis indicated an association between smoking and disease recurrence (p<0.024) but there was no association between smoking and tumour size and also between smoking and lymph node involvement (p=0.176 ،p=0.413 respectively). According to our results, appropriate interventions and proper education seemed to be essential for reduction of exposure to these compounds in breast cancer patients. This may, in turn, cause a reduction in breast cancer recurrence.

Keywords:

breast cancer , addiction , smoking , recurrence