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Lung cancer rates in decline, but varied by demographic
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Overall lung cancer rates are declining in the United States, but the patterns of prevalence differ based on sex, histologic type, racial/ethnic group and age, according to recent findings.
These demographic and subtype differences may be driven by historical cigarette smoking rates, smoking duration and cessation, chemical makeup of cigarettes, and exposure to other carcinogenic substances, the researchers wrote.
Denise Riedel Lewis
“It is important to monitor these changes as clinical cancer experts diagnose lung cancer and offer treatment based on specific characteristics of the cancer,” researcher Denise Riedel Lewis, PhD, MPH, of the National Cancer Institute, said in a press release. “These results can serve as a place marker for our population’s changing lung exposures.”
Lewis and colleagues collected information from nine SEER registries to evaluate lung cancer patterns among whites and blacks between 1977 and 2010. Trends among white non-Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and Hispanic whites were analyzed based on data from 13 SEER registries between 1992 and 2010. Lung cancer incidence was determined by histologic type, period, sex, racial/ethnic group and 5-year age bracket.
Although study data showed that rates of squamous and small cell carcinoma decreased in both sexes since the 1990s, declines occurred more slowly in women. Rates of adenocarcinoma declined among men through 2005, before increasing between 2006 and 2010 in both sexes and in all races/ethnicities.
A decrease also was observed in rates of unspecified lung cancer types. White and black racial groups exhibited a greater decline in men/women rate ratios than other racial groups. Younger women had higher recent rates of adenocarcinoma than men for all racial and ethnic groups. Lung cancer rates continued to be greater among men than women.
Between 1965 and 2010, Lewis and colleagues found that the age-adjusted percentage of white men who smoked decreased from 50% to 21%, while declines among white women dropped from 34% to 18%. During the same period, the rate of black men who smoked decreased from almost 60% to 23%; among black women smokers it dropped from 32% to 17%.
From 1990 through 1992 to 2008 through 2010, the prevalence of smoking declined among Hispanic men (26% to 17%), Hispanic women (16% to 10%) and Asian men (25% to 15%), and it remained steady among Asian women (6% to 7%).
“Although it is not possible to directly relate the changes in smoking prevalence to the observed rates of lung cancer, the timing of cessation and the rise of cigarettes with a different composition likely have changed the magnitude and range of risks observed for the various histologic types,” the researchers wrote.
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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