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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Lung Cancer Remains Leading Cause of Cancer Deaths in US Women [04/14-2]
Excerpts from: Lung Cancer Affects Sexes Differently
Their report reflects a growing medical interest in understanding differences in the way major diseases affect men and women. Researchers have recognized, for instance, that women who have heart attacks may not suffer the crushing pain that men experience and that women are more prone than men to autoimmune diseases like lupus and multiple sclerosis.
The article by Dr. Bach and his colleagues, being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, calls lung cancer "a contemporary epidemic" in women. Most cases, up to 80 percent in women, are from smoking. Last year, 80,100 new cases were diagnosed in American women, and 68,800 women died from the disease.
The report notes that although women's death rates from lung cancer have stabilized in the last five years, they may start increasing again as groups of women with the highest rates of smoking reach the age when cancers begin to develop.
Lung cancer is among the deadliest cancers, because it often starts spreading before being detected. Among cases diagnosed from 1992 to 1999, only 12 percent of patients over all survived five years, 10 percent of the men and 14 percent of the women.
The disease kills more women in the United States than any other cancer, as many as breast cancer and all gynecological cancers combined. Lung cancer passed breast cancer in 1987 as the leading cause of cancer deaths in women. From 1930 to 1997, as more and more women took up smoking, their death rate from lung cancer rose 600 percent.
Although smoking has been known for decades to cause most lung cancers, a quarter of adult women in the United States smoke. In 2000, 30 percent of high school girls surveyed said they had smoked in the last 30 days. Since the 1960's, smoking rates for American men have decreased nearly 50 percent. For women, the decrease is 25 percent.
Multiple studies have found higher rates of genetic damage caused by tobacco in lung tumors in female smokers than in male ones, even though the women had, over all, smoked less. Women also appear less able to repair genetic damage.
Compared with male smokers, women who smoke also have a more active version of a gene that makes chemicals in cigarette smoke more harmful to cells. Estrogen may make that gene more active.
Even though women appear more vulnerable to tissue damage from cancer-causing chemicals in cigarette smoke, those who develop lung cancer survive a bit longer than men with the disease. Researchers are not sure why, and that is another reason more research is needed, Dr. Bach said.
click here to view the abstract of this article from JAMA
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