Women Live Longer With Lung Cancer
Reported November 3, 2005
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Women with lung cancer may have an advantage over men with the disease when it comes to survival. New research shows women with lung cancer live longer than men, even if the disease goes untreated.
Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York reviewed nearly 19,000 cases of stage 1 and stage 2 non-small cell lung cancers. Patients were divided into three groups depending on the treatment they received — surgery, chemo and/or radiation, or no treatment.
In the patients receiving treatment, the five-year survival rates were 54 percent for women, but just 40 percent for men. The same women had a 30-percent lower risk of dying than the men. When researchers looked at women and men receiving no treatment, the females had a 21-percent lower risk of death from lung cancer than men. The results suggest lung cancer in women has a different biologic behavior and natural history than it does in men. The research also showed women lived longer than men after controlling for age, race, disease stage at diagnosis, histology, median income, geographic area, access to care, and type of treatment.
Juan Wisnivesky, M.D., from Mount Sinai, says, “In patients with lung cancer receiving treatment, women have shown a better response to therapy, resulting in better survival rates. Yet, new data suggest that even in untreated patients, women with lung cancer still live longer than men, despite the presence of other medical conditions or gender differences in life expectancy.”
W. Michael Alberts, M.D., from the American College of Chest Physicians in Northbrook, Ill., says, “It is clear that gender plays a role in the survival rate of men and women. Physicians caring for patients with lung cancer should consider the inherent progression of lung cancer among men and women when deciding on a patient’s course of treatment.”
According to the American Cancer Society, nearly 173,000 men and women will be diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. Its Web site states about 163,510 people will die from the disease: 90,490 men and 73,020 women.
SOURCE: CHEST 2005, the 71st annual international scientific assembly of the American College of Chest Physicians in Montreal, Oct. 29 – Nov.2, 2005