Smoking Seems to Increase Risk of Contracting HIV

[Tuckerfan]

It looks to be a pretty big risk factor, too.

According to the study, smokers are between 60% and 300% more likely to contract HIV than nonsmokers (BBC News, 9/23). The researchers said they are not sure why the link exists, but they note the increasing evidence that smoking raises the risk of contracting all types of infections, possibly because it might alter the structure of the lungs or weaken the immune system. According to the researchers, tobacco use is often higher among groups at higher risk for HIV transmission, including commercial sex workers (New York Times, 9/26). Nine of 10 other studies the researchers looked at showed no evidence that tobacco smoking increased the progression of HIV to AIDS, according to the researchers (Reuters, 9/20).

There’s links on the page to the journals which printed the studies. Most of the data was collected before the widespread use of anti-HIV drugs in many countries, so that might be skewing some of the results.

[uglybeech]

I’m learning to ignore 95% of epidemiological studies. There’s just an unbelievable amount of b.s. (bad science) going on in that area. Especially when it comes to the second-hand reports in the press.

Buried in the verbiage, they admit this could be the result of “residual confounding” [factors] as they put it. And if you put your brain to it for half a second you’d see that the smart money is that’s exactly it. By definition, if you smoke, you take gigantic risks with your health. Big shock: people who take gigantic risks with their health are more likely to get HIV. Who’d have guessed that? You can adjust for socioeconomic class, marital status, race, sex…but there’s no way to adjust fully for the subtler variables, no matter how gifted a statistician you are.

I’d be more impressed if smokers had higher rates of progression from HIV to AIDS, that there was some sort of tobbacco related immunosuppression or something, but they said no, they found no effect on that number.

Is it possible that tobbacco might be suppressing immunity? Sure, why not. My gripe is that studies like this shouldn’t get anywhere near the lay media, because the public can’t distinguish between pseudo-scientific observational guesswork like this and actual science.