Noemi Castelletti gave an oral presentation and presented a poster with the title “Mechanistic Modeling of Radiation and Smoking causing Lung Cancer”. The results of her research project showed that the development of normal lung-cells into lung-cancer cells is a different process for smokers and for non-smokers. Radiation showed the biggest effects on the death/inactivation rate of the initiated cells in both pathways. These effects were interpreted as a lifelong molecular damage in the cells.
Smoking also strongly affected the death/inactivation rate, but it was interpreted to be an inflammation process.
Radiation effects were sex-independent, smoking effects were strongly sex-related. These differences are very important in considering datasets that contain smoking information. Not considering smoking as an important factor leads to a misunderstanding of the analyzed dataset.
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