BREATHING DISORDER PUTS BLACKS AT HIGH CANCER RISK.

"Blacks with a history of the chronic breathing disorder COPD have a far greater risk of developing lung cancer than whites who have the lung disease, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

They said the high risk for blacks with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease highlights the need for better risk assessment tools that take race and ethnicity into account.

'The one-size-fits-all risk prediction clearly does not work,' Carol Etzel of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, whose report appears in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, said in a statement.

Etzel's team developed the risk assessment tool for African Americans to help doctors better predict a patient's specific risk for lung cancer.

They analyzed data from 491 African Americans with lung cancer and 497 African Americans without lung cancer to look for risk factors. They compared these with existing risk models for whites.

The new model found black men with a prior history of COPD had a more than sixfold increased risk of lung cancer, on par with someone who is actively smoking."