Main characteristics of study participants are shown in Table 1. In the Hawaii Study, we found that subjects with the CHRNA3 T allele or the CHRNA5 A allele had a higher age-, sex-, race-adjusted mean nicotine equivalents with a dominant genetic effect (Table 2). Adjustment for other determinants of nicotine equivalents, particularly, number of cigarettes per day, attenuated this association only slightly, indicating that carriers of the T or A allele are exposed to higher levels of nicotine per cigarette dose. The mean sum of the urinary NNK metabolites (NNAL+ NNAL-Gluc) also increased with the number of T and A alleles, even after adjusting for potential confounders. These associations were significant in each sex and in European Americans for the A allele. The T and A alleles were less common in Japanese Americans (3%) and Native Hawaiians (∼19%) than European Americans (34%) and, thus, the power was lower in these groups.
