African-American women who have never smoked have a high prevalence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) -7 percent versus 5.2% of European-American womenand 2.9% of never-smoking European-American men.
Researchers are scrambling to explain it because COPD is the third leading cause of death in the USA and smoking is considered the biggest risk factor for the disease. Yet 25 percent of Americans with COPD have never smoked.
A study used a representative sample of 129,535 Americans aged 50 and older who had never smoked. The sample included 8,674 African American women, 2,708 African American men, 80,317 white women, and 37,836 white men, drawn from the 2012 Behavioural Risk Surveillance.
"Some of women's greater vulnerability to COPD may be due to physiological differences. When we took into account height (a proxy for lung size), the odds of COPD among women compared to men were less elevated. However, we still found women had approximately 50% higher odds of COPD compared to white men even when we adjusted for height, education, income, and health care access" said lead author, Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, Sandra Rotman Endowed Chair and Director of the Institute for Life Course & Aging at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work.
It gets speculative from there. wondering if it could be hormone differences or even things that have never shown to cause a death, like second-hand smoke. Why not add in third hand? The US EPA has taken to claiming particulate matter, like particles on clothing after someone smoked, cause acute deaths.
Though they know they can't show causality, the authors do it anyway, contending that more black women live in poverty and that means more smoking and pollution, including in their workplaces. Where are Americans still smoking inside buildings? That is unclear.