One in four smokers who carry a gene mutation found in two per cent of the population will develop lung cancer, a large-scale study has shown.

The defective gene, known as BRCA2, has long been linked to breast and ovarian cancers.

Scientists found that a specific flaw in the gene almost doubles the overall risk of lung cancer.

A quarter of smokers, who generally have a 13 per cent life-time risk of lung cancer, were predicted to develop the disease if they had the mutation.

'Our results show that some smokers with BRCA2 mutations are at an enormous risk of lung cancer - somewhere in the region of 25 per cent over their lifetime,' said study leader Professor Richard Houlston, from the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

'Lung cancer claims more than a million lives a year worldwide and is by far the biggest cancer killer in the UK.

'We know that the single biggest thing we can do to reduce death rates is to persuade people not to smoke, and our new findings make plain that this is even more critical in people with an underlying genetic risk.'

The scientists scoured the DNA of more than 17,000 Europeans with and without lung cancer looking for any differences linked to the disease.

They spotted a specific alteration in the genetic code of BRCA2 known as c.9976T that was strongly associated with lung cancer.

It was especially prevalent among patients with the most common form of the disease, known as squamous cell lung cancer.

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Rare gene doubles lung cancer risk

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