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The relation between passive smoking and lung cancer was examined by means of a case-control study in a cohort of 27,409 nonsmoking Swedish women identified from questionnaires mailed in 1961 and 1963. A total of 77 cases of primary carcinoma of the bronchus or lung were found in a follow-up of the cohort through 1980. A new questionnaire in 1984 provided information on smoking by study subjects and their spouses as well as on potential confounding factors. The study revealed a relative risk of 3.3, constituting a statistically significant increase (p less than 0.05) for squamous cell and small cell carcinomas in women married to smokers and a positive dose-response relation. No consistent effect could be seen for other histologic types, indicating that passive smoking is related primarily to those forms of lung cancer which show the highest relative risks in smokers.
Pershagen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.