Smokeless Tobacco Use Is Condemned

Researchers hope a study of 1,100 baseball players will keep other boys from using smokeless tobacco, which their study strongly links to lesions in the mouth and receding gums.

“The prevalence was much greater than we had thought,” said Paul Robertson, dean of dentistry at the University of British Columbia. The study of major and minor league baseball players for the last two years during spring training in Arizona will conclude next year.

Baseball players were chosen because they are known to be great users of snuff and chewing tobacco and are role models for the adolescent males who make up smokeless tobacco products’ biggest market, Robertson said. Ninety-five percent of the players, coaches and managers took part in the voluntary physicals, and about 60% were smokeless tobacco users.

The players rinse their mouths to remove all traces of smokeless tobacco before they are checked, “so the data is unbiased, which makes the results even more frightening,” he said.

Growths and Lesions

About half of the current users had lesions or growths in their mouths at the site where they used smokeless tobacco, Robertson said. The gum tissue also had receded in users.

“The amount of receding gums was more than twice what we found in the baseball players who did not use smokeless tobacco. It’s site-specific. Where you hold the smokeless tobacco is where you have the damage,” he said.

Robertson said the gum recession is permanent, but researchers still don’t know what happens to the lesions over time.

“If you quit, the lesion goes away,” he said, displaying slides of the growths found in players’ mouths. “What we don’t know is if you don’t quit, how many of them go on to become cancer of the mouth.

“We know that some do; we don’t know how many.”

Robertson said researchers believe they may be seeing fewer problems among the baseball players than they would in the general population because of the athletes’ greater fitness and health awareness.

Chris Klose of the Smokeless Tobacco Council in Washington said about 10 million to 12 million Americans use smokeless tobacco. “The council’s position is that smokeless tobacco has never, ever been scientifically proven to be the cause of any human disease,” Klose said.

About 67,000 Canadian males age 15 or older use chewing tobacco and 38,400 use snuff, according to the Health and Welfare Department. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 3 million Americans younger than 21 use smokeless tobacco.

Use of Snuff

Seventy percent of the players in the study use snuff, 20% use chewing tobacco and 10% use both, said Robertson.

The research project, which includes physicians, dentists, epidemiologists and psychologists, originated at UC San Francisco, where Dean John Greene is “an avid baseball fan.” Robertson, a Houston native and also a baseball fan, came to Vancouver from San Francisco about a year ago. Both universities are now cooperating.

“As smoking has become more and more socially unacceptable, there has been a tremendous increase in the last decade in the use of smokeless tobacco,” he said, adding that the potential for addiction is the same as cigarettes. “It would appear that quitting smokeless tobacco is as difficult as quitting smoking, but we don’t know that and that’s one of the things we have to ask.”