Peter Attia· MD
there are associations between the number of pack years and the risk of developing lung cancer now a pack year is is it's not an ideal clinical variable because of course you can't measure it in a um in a completely unbiased way the way just so your patients understand but when we how we figure out you know how a doctor tries to figure out how many pack years a patient has smoke meaning we basically multiply the number of years of smoking how many years they smoke for by the number of packs per day that they smoked well how do we get that information well we have to ask the patient and the reality is number one patients smoke different amounts of time right over there over their time number two you know they don't always remember perfectly so it's it's not a great um uh metric in that regard so the the it's difficult to really pin it down perfectly i have seen studies that have suggest for sure such that there isn't you know increase when you go as you go from zero to higher levels but then around 20 or 30 pack years some studies argue that then kind of plateaus that you kind of you may be sort of saturating