The Wall Street Journal reports that while lung cancer rates in men are falling, more women are being diagnosed with the disease but ACSH staffers are skeptical.
According to the article:
ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross says that the article's headline Lung Cancer in Women is on the Rise, is bizarrely exaggerated. If you look carefully at their graph, you might see that women s cancer rates after the late eighties appear similar to the trend in men just before their cancer rates began to decline, from 1980 through 1990.
"Further, the study discussed in the article purportedly supporting the rise in women's lung cancer involved female mice and has nothing to do with lung cancer in women. In fact, the decline in women s smoking rates has been both slower and less pronounced than in men, which is why the decrease in women s lung cancer rates is only now in the plateau phase. Hopefully, it will have an accelerated decline within the next few years.
The article also refers to another study indicating that who have never smoked are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than male never-smokers, but ACSH s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan adds, the fact remains that lung cancer in never-smokers is rare in both women and men.