Milan study says smokers who give up have higher risk of cancer due to cell repair mechanism leading to unrestrained cell growth. true?

Must be distorted: This is simply not true epidemiologically. As a pathologist, there's a lot more cell turnover in a current smoker's lung than there is after they stop. The molecular pathways of cancer are numerous and being clarified as we go, but this doesn't make sense. I've noticed over the years that medical research from italy in particular tends to get scrambled in the media even worse than other science.