Jump to content

Lung cancer hits women differently


Recommended Posts

http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJ ... VlRUV5eTE1

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

By PATRICIA ANSTETT

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

DETROIT - Doctors are discovering gender differences in lung cancer.

Not only are women catching up to men in getting the disease, they are more likely to develop lung cancer before age 50, according to a comprehensive analysis of lung cancer in the United States.

Yet women have a better chance of being free of cancer five years later, at every stage of diagnosis.

The study by the University of Michigan and Wayne State Medical School researchers was published in the March issue of the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. It analyzed 22,572 cancer patients, 36 percent of them women, in the federal cancer registry known as SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results).

Overall, women and men typically are diagnosed with lung cancer at about the same age: 66 years, the study found.

But 8.6 percent of women were diagnosed before 50, compared with 6.9 percent of men.

Women also tend to have different kinds of lung cancer. More women are diagnosed with adenocarcinomas, non-small-cell lung cancers found in the outer reaches of the lungs. They are most likely linked to the use of filtered cigarettes, says Dr. Gregory Kalemkerian, senior author of the study. Adenocarcinomas accounted for 44.7 percent of the diagnoses of women in the study. Small-cell cancers, those in hormonal cells in the lungs, accounted for 22.6 percent.

By comparison, squamous cell carcinomas, another type of non-small-cell cancer, found in lung airways, accounted for 36.3 percent of lung cancers in men, followed by adenocarcinomas, diagnosed in 33.2 percent.

Other findings:

Incidence of lung cancer in men peaked in 1984, at 72.5 cases per 100,000 people. It declined to 47 for each 100,000 by 1999. By comparison, incidence rates for women peaked at 33.1 per 100,000 in 1991, and have held steady between 30.2 and 32.3 per 100,000 from 1992 to 1999.

Metastatic disease was the most common stage at diagnosis for men (43.4 percent) and women (43.9 percent).

Kalemkerian says that although the study has some limitations, largely because the SEER database has no information about a person's smoking history and habits, it provides good information for future studies to analyze gender differences in lung cancer.

6691946

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.