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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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THE WEEK, Page 22HEALTH & SCIENCESmoke Gets in Your Eyes
Two studies show a powerful link between cigarettes and
cataracts
Cataracts are by far the world's leading cause of blindness,
causing visual impairment in more than 3 million people in the
U.S. and 50 million globally. Americans alone undergo about a
million operations a year to have clouded lenses removed from
their eyes. A pair of major studies in J.A.M.A. (Journal of the
American Medical Association) has now concluded that 20% of
those cases may be caused by an activity already implicated in
cancer, stroke and heart disease: cigarette smoking.
Earlier studies hinted that cataracts are associated with
smoking, along with other factors, including exposure to
ultraviolet light and the use of steroids and alcohol. But this
is the strongest evidence yet. Researchers monitored nearly
18,000 male physicians and more than 50,000 female nurses for
five and eight years respectively, asking about smoking behavior
and checking the incidence of cataract surgery. The conclusion:
men who smoked more than a pack a day ran twice the risk of
nonsmokers for developing lenses cloudy enough to require their
removal; women who so indulged had a 60% greater risk than their
abstemious counterparts. Both men and women lowered their chance
of developing cataracts if they stopped smoking -- but still got
them more often than those who never smoked.
The actual mechanism by which smoking induces cataracts is
still unclear. One theory argues that blood is starved of
important nutrients. But that's just a guess; more certain is
that there is now yet another good reason not to smoke.