Penn Medicine: What Women Need to Know About Lung Cancer
Lung cancer has a reputation for being a man's disease – a male smoker's disease, specifically – and for targeting smokers and former smokers when it does occasionally cross gender lines.
While these stereotypes have never been entirely true, they've also never been further from the truth. According to the American Lung Association, lung cancer diagnoses have risen a startling 84% among women over the past 42 years while dropping 36% among men over the same period. The overall number of cases remains fairly steady.
Shaking up stereotypes even further, approximately 20% of women diagnosed with lung cancer today are lifelong non-smokers (by contrast, only 1 in 12 men with lung cancer have never smoked). So while men still make up the majority of lung cancer diagnoses, the gender gap is narrowing, with lung cancer's sights seemingly set on women with no obvious behavioral "reason" for the disease.
For men and women alike, these shocking statistics beg the question why?
