Lung cancer, a largely incurable disease, remains the leading cause of cancer deaths among women each year in the United States, exceeding annual breast cancer mortality in women and accounting for 12% of all new female cancer cases (Table 1). Although lung cancer has always been and continues to be more prevalent in men than in women, lung cancer mortality patterns now reveal that the rate of rise of such cancer deaths among men has slowed and begun to decline since 1990, whereas in women it has continued to rise. Several studies suggest that women are more susceptible than men to lung cancer and to conditions, like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, that predispose to this cancer; hence the question has been raised as to whether lung cancer is a different disease in women than in men.
Overall smoking remains the most important risk factor for the development of lung cancer in both women and men, and the smoking trends have changed in women over the years to parallel an increase...
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Suggested Reading
Healey Baldini, E., & Strauss, G. M. (1997). Women and lung cancer: Waiting to exhale. Chest, 112(Suppl.), 229S–234S.
Mountain, C. F., Libshitz, H. I., & Hermes, K. E. (1999). Lung cancer: A handbook for staging, imaging, and lymph node classification. Houston, TX: Charles P. Young Company.
Siegfried, J. M. (2001). Women and lung cancer: Does oestrogen play a role? The Lancet Oncology, 2, 506–513.
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© 2004 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
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Franco, S., Glassberg, M. (2004). Lung Cancer. In: Encyclopedia of Women’s Health. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48113-0_246
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48113-0_246
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