Population attributable risk of tobacco and alcohol for upper aerodigestive tract cancer

Abstract

Tobacco and alcohol are major risk factors for upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) cancer and significant variation is observed in UADT cancer rates across Europe. We have estimated the proportion of UADT cancer burden explained by tobacco and alcohol and how this varies with the incidence rates across Europe, cancer sub-site, gender and age.

This should help estimate the minimum residual burden of other risk factors to UADT cancer, including human papillomavirus. We analysed 1981 UADT cancer cases and 1993 controls from the ARCAGE multi-centre study.

Keywords

• Upper aerodigestive tract cancer
• ARCAGE study
• Population attributable risk
• Tobacco
• Alcohol
• squamous-cell carcinomas
• human-papillomavirus
• neck-cancer
• head
• association
• smoking
• europe
• sweden
• trends