Feburary 23, 2011 - Patients who smoke during radiation treatments for head and neck cancer show a much lower long-term survival rate than those who quit. A study of patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck showed that only 23% of smokers survived after five years of treatment, compared to 55% of those who did not smoke. Dr. Allen Chen, residency training program director at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, said, “I wanted concrete data to see if smoking was detrimental in terms of curability, overall survival and tolerability of treatment. We showed continued smoking contributed to negative outcomes with regard to all of those,”

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