Tackshs

During the XIV National Congress of the Italian Society of Tabaccology (SITAB) that was held in Florence on 8-9^thof November 2018, Giulia Carreras received the first “Umberto Veronesi Foundation” award for research on smoking and women. The award was established as a concrete commitment of the foundation to be alongside independent researchers with the goal of keeping women away from cigarettes, and was established in this first edition for young researchers that carried out a research on smoking and the fair sex.

Giulia Carreras presented a research carried out within the TackSHS Project on the burden of deaths and years of life lived with disability (DALYs) from breast cancer due to active and passive smoking exposure in Italy.

In 2017 in Italy, 15% of women were smoking and 14% of women were exposed to second-hand smoke. However, exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke has a greater impact than active smoking and the reasons for these differences are still unclear. As a consequence, eliminating to second-hand smoke exposure in women could avoid 2.7% of deaths from breast cancer and 3.4% of years of DALYs in 2014. In terms of active smoking, if smokers quitted smoking, the percentage of breast cancer deaths and DALYs that could have been saved was respectively of 1.6% and 1.3%.

The importance of the researcher’s work lies in the fact that the impact assessment of second-hand smoke exposure on breast cancer was introduced only in 2017 in the estimates that the Global Burden of Disease produces annually for the whole world. This contribution is the first work that estimates the impact of smoking on breast cancer in Italy.

It is important that the link between smoking and breast cancer becomes better known among the Italian population.