I had no idea hookahs produced benzene. Keir smoked hookahs several times; no idea also how many times one 'needs' to be exposed to raise the risk. He didn't smoke otherwise and had no other exposure to benzene, but I shared this with him as something to always avoid. He also had no idea. Hookah bars are very popular here, or were a few years back anyway among the college and 20something crowd.

Lori

I was surprised by this as well. I am convinced my parents second hand smoke was a contributor to many aml.

Benzene is a known risk factor and most concentrated in tobacco smoke. There are 40 million smokers in the U.S. and less than 20,000 per year come down with AML, many of whom have never touched a cigarette. So maybe there is a correlation but at those percentages it seems like a pretty weak link. I think the major cause of AML is nothing more than bad luck.

Certainly bad luck plays a part. But the relationship here is nothing new -- gas and oil workers are over-represented in leukemia because of their exposure to benzene. That has been confirmed for probably at least a decade (I am not sure), and anything that would increase your intake of benzene is surely going to increase your chances of getting leukemia. Does this make it a certainty -- well of course not. If you go out, get smashed and drive home, is it a certainty that you will kill someone? So go ahead and do it, right? Let's be serious -- anything that increases the chances needs to be avoided to the maximum extent possible.

So here is my theory of what is happening. There are people like me who have never smoked (oh sure, I took a few puffs when I was a teen ager, and coughed my guts out), but for all intents and purposes I am a non- smoker and was at 64 when I got AML. So what happened? Well, something kicked my genetics around so that my 8 and 21 got in the wrong place, and this caused a mutant stem cell to start producing blasts that refused to grow up and do what normal blood cells do. It could have been cosmic radiation that caused it for all I know -- I sure do not breathe exhaust from engines anymore than the average person or work in the gas/oil fields, so there is no history of benzene with me.

This does not mean that had I been a smoker I would not have gotten it sooner. The average age of getting AML is something close to 70, which in itself tells us that there is something that is wearing down within us all that makes us susceptible. Benzene obviously could act like radiation in kicking around our genetic makeup and creating a mutant stem cell that results in AML or some other type of leukemia.

It is all highly probabilistic just like smoking and lung cancer. But these studies are very important to enable us to reduce our probabilities to the lowest possible levels. -- dave