Fangyi Gu

National Cancer Institute

PostDoctoral Fellow

NLST (Learn more about this study)

NLST-65

Mar 14, 2014

Time To First Cigarette and Lung cancer, as well as other smoking related diseases

Targeting smokers at higher lung cancer risk can improve efficiency and reduce false positive detection in lung cancer screening. Our previous publication using data from a population based case-control study found that a single nicotine dependency variable, time to first cigarette (TTFC) at morning wake-up, was associated with lung cancer risk; the shorter the TTFC, the higher the lung cancer risk. TTFC differentiates lung cancer risk among smokers beyond smoking intensity, duration and pack-years. We hypothesize that TTFC may improve lung cancer risk prediction and therefore has the potential to improve lung cancer screening. To assess this hypothesis, we are requesting the NLST data in the ACRIN subgroup which collected TTFC information. We will replicate the TTFC and lung cancer association in this prospectively collected US population, and assess whether adding TTFC to existing lung cancer risk prediction models improves lung cancer risk stratification. In addition, we will examine the association between TTFC and other smoking-related cancer and diseases. TTFC, a smoking behavior phenotype, is rarely collected by existing epidemiology studies for disease outcomes. NLST-ACRIN provides a unique resource to study our research question.