Scientists have found that smoking a pack a day of cigarettes can cause 150 damaging changes to a smoker's lung cells each year. The findings come from a study of the devastating genetic damage, or mutations, caused by smoking in various organs in the body. This explains why smoking also causes many other types of cancer beside lung cancer. It found certain molecular fingerprints of DNA damage - called mutational signatures - in the smokers' DNA, and the scientists counted how many of these were in different tumors. In lung cells, they found that on average, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day led to 150 mutations in each cell every year.

Source: Fox News November 03, 2016 19:06 UTC