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Lung cancer more deadly to women than breast cancer
Source: (cancerfacts.com)
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
MADISON, Wis.– Dec. 15, 2004 – It is a little known fact that lung cancer kills more women each year than breast cancer. In fact, lung cancer kills more women than breast, uterine, and cervical cancer combined. Surprised? Many people are.
Dr. Joan Schiller, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison says the lack of awareness of that fact creates a significant health risk for women.
"Women just don't think about lung cancer as a risk to their health," she said in a news release. "I treat lung cancer patients all the time who got mammograms every year but ignored their constant cough."
While Dr. Schiller in no way downplays women's risks of breast cancer, she says she is frustrated by the lack of attention to lung cancer research. "Lung cancer, the biggest cancer killer in this country, receives 10 times less funding per death than breast cancer research, and 30 times less per death than HIV/AIDS research. It gets frustrating to tell patients that I have run out of treatment options for them. Something needs to be done," Schiller says.
Schiller and her colleagues decided themselves to change the status quo by forming Women Against Lung Cancer. WALC is dedicated to raising awareness of the lung cancer epidemic in women, increasing funding for research, expanding research into sex differences in lung cancer, and training more professionals to treat lung cancer patients.
While getting people to quit smoking, or better yet, never start, is the primary way to decrease the death toll, that effort does little to help those current, former, and never-smokers with lung cancer here and now.
Schiller says there currently is no single, accepted screening technique to catch lung cancers early. Compared to mammograms to detect breast cancer and Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, very little has been done to improve early detection of the leading cause of cancer deaths.
A CT scan screening trial is currently under way, and shows great promise, according to Dr. Claudia Henschke, of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. But even if the trial proves it effective, we are still years away from seeing this in standard clinical practice. Until then, former and current smokers, and those with a family history of lung cancer, are on their own to ask their doctors for chest X-rays or CT scans that could save their lives.
In terms of treatment, little research has gone into lung cancer. A few new treatments recently available are unexpectedly specific, and have primarily been developed in the pharmaceutical sector. Federal funding for lung cancer research lags well behind most other diseases, and it's unlikely that major advances can be made without significant additional investments, according to Schiller.
In an effort to change the situation, Schiller's WALC has launched a petition drive to convince Congressional leaders to increase federal funding for lung cancer research and the 180,000 American lives per year who die of lung cancer. To sign the petition visit the Women Against Lung Cancer web site www.4walc.org.
SOURCE: WALC Press release
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