Digital Scholarship and Initiatives

This brief news article reports on a study by John Spangler, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, which examined use of smokeless tobacco by Cherokee and (apparently) Lumbee women 18 or older. The study's results suggest a relationship between use of smokeless tobacco (or snuff) and higher mortality rates from breast cancer. Twenty-three percent of Lumbee women use snuff--a rate that is 38 times the national average. Fifty-one percent of Lumbee women over 65 use snuff. The breast cancer mortality rate for Lumbee women was 23.2 per 100,000--higher than the rate for Native American women overall, and higher than the rate for White women in North Carolina.