Chinese food cooking and lung cancer in women nonsmokers

Cigarette smoking cannot fully explain the epidemiologic characteristics of lung cancer in Taiwanese women, who smoke rarely but have lung cancer rela tively often. In a previous study, the authors suspected that exposure to f umes from cooking oils was an important risk factor for lung cancer in Taiw anese women nonsmokers in the Republic of China. In a new case-control stud y conducted in 1993-1996, they further explored the association of oil fume s with lung cancer in women. Two sets of controls were used concurrently. T he subjects were 131 nonsmoking incident cases with newly diagnosed and his tologically confirmed primary carcinoma of the lung, 252 hospital controls hospitalized for causes unrelated to diseases of smoking, and 262 community controls; all controls were women nonsmokers matched by age and date of in terview. Details on cooking conditions and habits were collected, in additi on to other epidemiologic data. Lung cancer risk increased with the number of meals per day to about threefold for women who cooked these meals each d ay, The risk was also greater if women usually waited until fumes were emit ted from the cooking oil before they began cooking (adjusted odds ratios = 2.0-2.6) and if they did not use a fume extractor (adjusted odds ratios = 3 .2-12.2). These results suggest that a proportion of lung cancer may be att ributable to the habit of waiting until the cooking oil has been heated to a high temperature before cooking the food.