Women smokers run twice lung cancer risk than men

Main Category: Lung Cancer
Article Date: 10 Feb 2004 - 0:00 PDT


If you take a woman who smokes 20-a-day, and a man who smokes 20-a-day, the woman will run a much greater risk of developing lung cancer.

According to research carried out on 2,500 people (men and women) over 40, women ran double the risk of getting lung cancer than men (if you compare a man and a woman who smoke the same amount each day).

In the study, 1202 women and 1288 men underwent computed tomography scans (CT scans). They were being screened for lung cancer. All the men and women had smoked a packet a day for ten years or five packets a day for five years.

The Scans (plus follow up) revealed that 45 of the women and 20 of the men had lung cancer.

Women were more than twice as likely to develop lung cancer than men. This was after factoring in such things as age and smoking history.
v If more research confirms there findings, maybe anti-smoking efforts should be concentrated more on teenage girls. More and more teenage girls are starting to smoke in the western world (many say that they do it in order not to get fat).

The researchers said that they could not be sure why it is that women run a higher risk of getting lung cancer than men. Some say it could be a matter of how well men and women metabolise (clear out) the toxins from tobacco smoke. They said that they needed to carry out more research.

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