Psychology
Your risk of lung cancer may be influenced by personality, but it’s still best to inhale only air.
Your risk of lung cancer may be influenced by personality, but it’s still best to inhale only air.
Ilike popcorn. like lungs they seem important). I’m not sure I like “popcorn lung”, something we’ve heard a little about recently, with the rise in popularity of e-cigarettes.
Popcorn lung is more scientifically known as bronchiolitis obliterans and is an irreversible inflammation of the bronchioles, our lungs’ smallest air passages. Its less scientific name hints at the perhaps hundreds of deaths of people who had breathed in diacetyl, a buttery-flavoured chemical that was used in, among other things, microwave popcorn. More recently, it was used as a flavouring in many e-cigarette brands.
From our contemporary vantage-point it makes sense that deliberately breathing stuff that isn’t just air into our lungs might be a bad idea. Vaping developed because we know that cigarettes cause cancer, right?
But it wasn’t always that way. In lay discourse there was an open question as to whether tobacco caused cancer, or people with a predisposition to cancer were drawn to smoke cigarettes more. Chicken or egg? This was an argument that certainly worked in the favour of cigarette manufacturers, which, from the late 1950s, were at least worried – or, more likely, 100% certain – that cigarette smoke was poisonous.
But what if I told you that it was your personality that determined your likelihood of developing lung cancer – specifically, if your personality is characterised by “passivity in the face of stressful stimulation from the outside”. This was the controversial proposition, made in the 1980s and 90s, that grew from a fertile collaboration between German physician Ronald Grossarth-Maticek and German-born British psychologist Hans Eysenck.
In many ways, Eysenck, who died in 1997, is the more important protagonist in this thriller. He was an academic star, publishing prolifically during a time when writing involved typewriters and submission of manuscripts by snail mail. There are more than 1000 articles and 80 books bearing his name. He was a big deal, and apparently happy to court controversy.
Eysenck was a rock-solid believer that health sprang from one’s personality and, increasingly as his career went on, that personality reflects biology. In this context, the proposal he made in conjunction with Grossarth-Maticek is entirely consistent – you develop lung cancer because of your personality, and that personality may coincidentally predispose you to smoke cigarettes. Rather than actively manage your stressful life, which is what really causes cancer, you do nothing but suck passively on your notcancer stick.
His controversial claim was backed up with increasingly controversial studies. To test these ideas, Grossarth-Maticek presented data from a series of “prospective” prediction studies in which you assess people’s personalities, then see who dies (or doesn’t) of what over the next 10 years. Three of these studies involved more than 3000 people. After 10 years, almost four in 10 of those with a cancer-prone personality had died of cancer. Among those reporting a health-conducive personality, less than 1% died of cancer.
Health researchers calculate relative risk by dividing the probability of an event occurring in an exposed group by the probability of the event occurring in an unexposed group. In this
The name “popcorn lung” hints at the hundreds of deaths of people who have breathed in diacetyl.
case, that relative risk means cancerprone people are at 121 times more risk of dying from cancer. A relative risk of 121 is huge, and a lot larger than the relative risk of cancer if you smoke.
Maybe too good to be true? Indeed, nobody else has been able to reproduce these results in independent studies.
Jump to May 2019 and the publication of an investigation by Eysenck’s employer, King’s College London. It concluded that the findings of 26 Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck studies describe results that are “incompatible with modern clinical science” and therefore “unsafe”.
Time will tell if vaping is similarly unsafe.