By the year 2020, World Health Organization figures reveal that tobacco use alone will cause 10 million deaths per year worldwide. We are developing an understanding of the pathway to carcinogenesis and are learning that there are many points for intervention. Education and intervention efforts can play a big role. To be effective, interventions need to take into account their target audiences as well other factors, including behavior, the environment, genetic susceptibility, ethnicity, age, and history of exp osure. Rimer said it is also important to think of people as being in various stages of readiness, from those we aren't even thinking about changing their behavior to those who have already tried a program and failed.
Tobacco use involves physiological, psychological, behavioral and genetic factors.
Rimer said that while there is unlikely to be a gene for addiction, we may be able to use susceptibility studies to help match treatments to populations. For example, she said, depressed smokers benefit from certain kinds of pharmacological adjuncts, while smokers who have particular susceptibility genes may benefit from knowing about them. In addition, depending on various factors such as motivation, education, and socio-economic factors, different populations may benefit from different approaches. Rimer spoke about the need to recognize that viruses should be an important part of our targets for cancer control. Oncogenic viruses have a capacity to persist which makes them very important for intervention.