New research by the University of Hawaii suggests that smokers with certain genes are likely to smoke more, increasing their risk for lung cancer.

UH Cancer Center researchers, led by epidemiologist Dr. Loic Le Marchand, discovered that smokers with these gene markers have a faster rate of nicotine metabolism and might need to inhale a greater amount of nicotine per cigarette to maintain the same levels of nicotine in the blood as those whose bodies metabolize slower.

“Nicotine is the highly addictive component in cigarettes that makes people want to smoke. Smokers adjust the way they smoke to satisfy their craving for nicotine,” Le Marchand said in a statement this week. “Smokers with the genetic markers, we discovered, smoke more extensively in order to keep their nicotine levels high and achieve the desired effects of nicotine in the brain.”

The research could help medical providers identify smokers with a higher risk for lung cancer, said Dr. Randall Holcombe, incoming director of the UH Cancer Center.

“The knowledge of these markers will help doctors and public health leaders improve strategies for cancer prevention, a major focus of research at the UH Cancer Center,” he said. “In addition, application of this research may improve the survival and quality of life of lung cancer patients, since continued use of tobacco products after diagnosis is known to correlate with poor outcomes.”

It could also make it easier for doctors to select the right patients for lung cancer screenings, Le Marchand added.

“The idea is to find some markers of high risk to be able to help determine the best candidates for screening,” he said. “Between 30 and 50 percent of the time, it’s a benign condition seen on the X-rays, so people have to go through a biopsy often to determine what it is. Testing would be more efficient because it would be less likely to be a false positive in that case.”

Smokers are about 25 times more likely to develop lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in Hawaii. The disease is difficult to diagnose because there are no early symptoms. There are 776 new cases and 526 deaths every year in the islands, with a five-year survival rate of only 18 percent, according to the Hawaii Tumor Registry.

Honolulu resident Zachary Smith, 32, said knowing that someone has the gene would likely not make a difference in behavior.

“Even if you know that you have it … you’d still have to go through the same process of quitting smoking as somebody without the gene,” said Smith, who was smoking at The Row Bar at Waterfront Plaza, formerly known as Restaurant Row, on Friday. “It doesn’t really change behavior or the way that quitting works anyway. Maybe it would be useful if there was like some sort of specific therapy that they had for treating that genetics. Maybe then it may be worth looking into. If it’s just, ‘Hey guess what?’ then it’s not really useful information.”

Craig Colton, a 26-year-old smoker, added, “I smoke by choice. … If I knew I had some sort of gene that made me prone to smoking, I don’t think it would change how I went about doing it.”

Researchers using data from the UH Cancer Center’s Multiethnic Cohort Study and international lung cancer genetic studies worked with scientists from the University of Minnesota and University of Southern California to evaluate nicotine metabolism among 2,239 smokers.

“We were able to translate differences in lung cancer risk that we first observed among Hawaii’s ethnic groups into information that has implications for the occurrence and prevention of a common and very deadly cancer,” Le Marchand said. “Those markers would be an additional reason to quit smoking. People might be more inclined to really try hard and quit smoking. By themselves it’s probably not enough to be really helpful. Hopefully, it will be part of a battery of biomarkers that could be used in the clinic by doctors.”