July 13, 2006
 
HEALTH: Lung Cancer Behaves Differently in Women Than Men
 
By Lee Bowman
Scripps Howard News Service
 
Women are twice as likely as men to develop lung cancer, a new study involving nearly 17,000 smokers confirms, but the findings also suggest that women have better odds at surviving the disease.
 
The report, published July 12, 2006 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, adds to evidence that lung cancer behaves differently in women and that tobacco smoke affects them differently as well.
 
"These findings highlight the need to educate younger women that they are at higher risk of developing lung cancer, even when they're smoking the same amount as men," said Dr. Claudia Henschke, senior investigator for the study and chief of chest imaging at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center.
 
"Based on their excess vulnerability to tobacco smoke, women may need to get screened for lung cancer earlier than men."
 
It's estimated that lung cancer will kill some 73,000 women in the United States this year -- proportionately only slightly fewer than the estimated 90,000 deaths among men.
 
Smoking prevalence among U.S. men has declined by nearly 50 percent since the 1960s. But smoking prevalence among women has fallen by only 25 percent in that same period. There's concern that more young women than young men are taking up smoking.
 
"We have to get the word out to teen girls, especially, that their long-term risk developing cancer is higher than that of males," Henschke said. "The best way to avoid lung cancer is to never take up smoking in the first place."
 
For the JAMA study, researchers at medical centers in the United States and Canada tracked 7,498 women and 9,427 men, at least 40 years old, who had a history of cigarette smoking and were initially screened for lung cancer between 1993 and 2005.
 
Lung cancer was diagnosed in 156 women and 113 men from the group during follow-up in that same time frame. After adjusting for differences in age and smoking history, women were found to have 1.9 times the risk of lung cancer that men did.
 
But the women who developed lung cancer were 52 percent less likely to die from the disease than men with lung cancer.
 
"This clears up some of the long-standing confusion surrounding gender and lung cancer," Henschke said. "Yes, given the same exposure, women are less likely to die from lung cancer than men, but they also have double the risk of getting the disease."
 
"Lung cancer appears to be a different disease in women," said Dr. Jyoti Patel, an oncologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago and lead author of a 2004 report published in JAMA. That research noted a 600 percent increase in lung-cancer deaths among U.S. women in the past century and a 60 percent boost in the number of lung-cancer diagnoses in women since 1990. Recent studies suggest that genetic, metabolic and hormonal factors, along with better health behaviors, reproductive experience, body size and composition, all influence how women react to carcinogens and lung cancer, but may also affect how women respond to treatment.
 
"Is women's cancer just less aggressive? Or is it more curable? We just don't know, but it's certainly an area that deserves more research,'' Henschke said.
 
On the Net: http://www.jama.com
 
www.cancer.gov
 
Contact Lee Bowman at BowmanL@SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com