In their recent publication, Baron and colleagues (1) reviewed the epidemiologic and biological evidence for the protective association between tobacco smoking and four “estrogen-related” malignancies (endometrial cancer, endometrioid and clear-cell ovarian cancers, and thyroid cancer). Notably, the review included thyroid cancer, for which the inverse association with smoking is observed in both women and men (2), and thus likely to be mediated through pathways that are not estrogen-related.

While Baron and colleagues focused on smoking and estrogen-related cancers, we note that a protective effect of smoking has been consistently observed for other cancers that occur more frequently in men than women, including melanoma and basal-cell carcinoma (BCC). The inverse association between smoking and these two cancers does not differ by sex, and is robust to careful adjustment for important potential confounding factors, including surveillance bias (3). Of the potential mechanisms described by Baron and...

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