Ladies, want another reason to quit smoking? A study presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America suggests that women who smoke are twice as likely as male smokers to develop lung cancer. Sounds puffed up? Read on. The long believed erroneous assumption that women have a lower susceptibility to lung cancer then men was likely based on their lower consumption of cigarettes. Not surprisingly, their changing consumption patterns are well reflected in the more recent lung cancer statistics. Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer in women today and it is estimated that more women will die of lung cancer this year than the total number of breast and colon cancer fatalities combined. Among men, rates of lung cancer leveled off in the mid-1980s and have fallen consistently, reflecting the drop in tobacco consumption that began in the 1960s. Women did not start cutting back until the 1980s, and so they will not see a drop in cancer rates for a decade.
Using computed tomography scanning, researchers studied nearly 3,000 male and female smokers 40 and older. Needless to say, they found that the risk of developing lung cancer increased with the amount smoked as well as with age. But they also found that independent of those two variables, women smokers still had double the cancer risk of men. That's not good, particularly since so many young women are now smoking. And though researchers remain undecided as to why women are so much more vulnerable to tobacco smoke, these findings suggest that there is a potential for a worsening epidemic of lung cancer in women in coming years. Though the explanation for this study remains unclear, the prescription – quitting now- is most certainly not.
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