Who Has Higher Incidence of Lung Cancer in United States: Young Women or Young Men?
Posted: Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Previous studies have shown that the rates of lung cancer in men and women between the ages of 30 and 54 have decreased over the past 2 decades. However, a new study shows that there is now a higher incidence of lung cancer among white and Hispanic women born since the mid-1960s. This is a reversal of the higher incidence of lung cancer seen in white and Hispanic men born before 1965. The study, which was led by Ahmedin Jemal, DVM, PhD, Vice President of the Surveillance and Health Services Research Program at the American Cancer Society, was published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Jemal and his colleagues studied data from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries focused on the incidence of invasive lung cancer in groups in the U.S. population from 1995 to 2014. The age-specific incidence of lung cancer was based on sex, race, age group, birth year, period of diagnosis, and prevalence of cigarette smoking.
For age groups, the investigators found that the female-to-male incidence rate ratios increased by more than 1.0 in each range studied (ages 30–34, 35–39, 40–44, and 45–49 years). They also found that the prevalence of cigarette smoking among women born since 1965 has met, but generally not exceeded, that among men.
According to Dr. Jemal and his team, their findings “are not fully explained by sex differences in smoking behaviors.” They also concluded that further studies of “sex differences in smoking-related susceptibility to lung cancer” are needed.
