Smoking harmful for both sexes

Women who smoke are no more likely than men to get lung cancer but, among non-smokers, women appear to have a higher risk than men, US researchers reported on Friday. Women who had never smoked were 1.3 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who had never smoked, Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues found. "We noted slightly higher age-standardized incidence rates of lung cancer in women who had never smoked than in men who had never smoked," Freedman and colleagues wrote in the Journal Lancet Oncology . His team looked at a survey of 279,214 men and 184,623 women aged 50 to 71 first questioned in 1995 or 1996. "The questionnaire asked participants about their past and current smoking status, demographics, alcohol intake, tobacco smoking, physical activity, and included a food-frequency questionnaire of 124 items," the researchers wrote. They were watched until 2003. "During follow-up, lung cancers occurred in 4,097 men and 2,237 women," the researchers wrote. Among men who had never smoked, 99 got lung cancer, compared with 152 women who never smoked. The researchers did not ask about how much anyone had smoked or whether they were exposed to second-hand smoke. Experts agree that second-hand smoke also causes lung cancer. "But when we compared smokers with similar smoking histories we noted that men tended to have slightly higher incidence rates than women. "Our findings suggest that women are not more susceptible than men to the carcinogenic effects of cigarette smoking in the lung," Freedman's team wrote. They said more study needs to be done to see if female non-smokers actually do have more of a risk of lung cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer worldwide, with almost 1.2 million deaths per year — 162,000 deaths a year in the United States alone.