20 Jan 2010, 0141 hrs IST

Health News: Children who face emotional, physical or sexual abuse, parental separation or domestic violence, are likely to develop lung cancer later in life, says a new study.

The link is partly explained by greater regularity in puffing cigarettes among childhood trauma victims, besides other factors.

David Brown and Robert Anda from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) worked with a research team to study the effects of all kinds of abuse, growing up in a household with the mentally ill, substance abusers or convicts.

"Adverse childhood experiences were associated with an increased risk of lung cancer, particularly premature death from lung cancer," said Brown.

"Although smoking behaviours, including early smoking initiation and heavy smoking, account for the greater part of this risk, other mechanisms or pathophysiologic pathways may be involved," he added.

Adverse event information was collected from 17,337 people between 1995 and 1997. Brown and his colleagues followed up on the medical records of these same people to study lung cancer rates in 2005.

"Compared to those who claimed no childhood trauma, people who experienced six or more traumas were about three times more likely to have lung cancer, identified either through hospitalisation records or mortality records," said Brown.

"Of the people who developed, or died of, lung cancer, those with six or more adverse events in childhood were roughly 13 years younger at presentation than those with none," he said, according to a CDC release.

"People who had experienced more adverse events in childhood showed more smoking behaviours," concluded Brown.

The findings appeared online in BMC Public Health.