Biology of Humans 6th Edition by Judith Goodenough,Betty McGuire

Exercise 4

In this chapter, we have considered chromosome deletions and environmental effects on genes. The following is an excerpt from Gunjan Sinha's report in Science Daily News, "Smoking erases Y chromomes." You can read the entire report at Gunjan Sinha, Science Daily News, 4 December 2014, 2:15 p.m., "To conduct the study, molecular oncologist Jan Dumanski and statistician Lars Forsberg of Uppsala University in Sweden took advantage of data collected from three ongoing Swedish trials. The long-term studies are looking for associations between behavioral, lifestyle, or other traits and disease. As part of the studies, data and blood are collected periodically. Dumanski and Forsberg compared the DNA in blood cells of smokers to nonsmokers in more than 6000 men. The only factors that correlated with high Y chromosome loss were age and smoking, the team reports online today in Sciencei, with smokers 2.4 to 4.3 times more likely to be missing Y chromosomes in their blood cells than nonsmokers."
Do the results of this study show that smoking causes the loss of the Y chromosome, as implied by the title of the report