So continuing on with my recent theme I am going to post about the
reported link between smoking and Dupuytren’s disease. Note that many of the
papers shown here are also used in the alcohol post and that the same link to
age applies.
(1) Burke et al, Journal of Hand Surgery, An assessment of the
Effects of Exposure to Vibration, Smoking, Alcohol and Diabetes on the
prevalence of Dupuytren's Disease in 97,537 miners, 2007.
In this paper they do see that there is a link between smoking and
Dupuytren’s disease and say that it does cause an increased risk to the
disease.
I will not go into detail but here they see that there is an
increased risk of Dupuytren's in response to both alcohol and tobacco but that
these increases occur independent of each other meaning that doing both further
increase your risk of getting these diseases.
This is a paper where they are looking specifically at a role of
smoking in Dupuytren’s patients. Here they see that a higher than normal
percentage of Dupuytren’s patients smoke and this adds further evidence to the
case. This paper suggests that the increased risk to smokers is approximately twice
that of a non-smoker.
To be honest I believe that there is a link between these disease
and smoking but I would like to know how and why this happens. This is a
question that is hard to answer when we do not know what causes these diseases.
I guess that smoking causes lots of problems with the body and maybe it makes
the body more susceptible to the trauma that causes the disease or to the
genetic factors. Either way I am just guessing but it does add another reason
to the long list of why not to smoke.
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