TUESDAY, March 24 (HealthDay News) -- Smoking is independently associated with an increased risk of pancreatitis, according to study findings published in the March 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Janne Schurmann Tolstrup, Ph.D., of the University of Southern Denmark in Copenhagen, and colleagues studied 9,573 women and 8,332 men, 235 of whom developed pancreatitis during a mean follow-up of 20.2 years.
In subjects who smoked 15 to 24 grams of tobacco per day, the investigators found a significantly increased risk of pancreatitis (hazard ratio, 2.6). They also found that increased alcohol intake was associated with an increased risk (hazard ratio, 1.09 per each additional drink per day), but that the risk of pancreatitis associated with smoking was independent of both alcohol and gallstone disease. About 46 percent of the pancreatitis cases in the study were attributable to smoking, the researchers note.
"The risk of total pancreatitis in ex-smokers was of similar size to the risk among light current smokers (1-14 g/d of tobacco)," the authors write. "This relatively high risk in the ex-smokers did not seem to be attributable to sick-quitters because omitting two and four years of follow-up, respectively, had only limited effect on the size of the hazard ratio."
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