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More than 160,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer—more than breast, colon, and prostate cancers combined.
Eight out of 10 cases of lung cancer are due to smoking or an indirect exposure to tobacco smoke; the rest are a result of exposure to industrial chemicals such as asbestos, arsenic, and polycyclic hydrocarbons, or to natural radioactive gases like radon. Some have no known cause at all. Some studies show that women who smoke have a higher incidence of lung cancer as compared to men, and women also die at a greater rate from lung cancer than men.
While it’s clear that the longer you smoke, the greater your chances are of developing lung cancer, not all smokers develop lung cancer. This leads researchers to think that there may be an inherited component that influences whether or not smoking will cause lung cancer. The majority of lung cancer cases occur in people aged 60 and older, though by the time it’s diagnosed at that age, the cancer has been under development for decades.
The symptoms of lung cancer vary greatly, from difficulty breathing to coughing up of blood to a loss of appetite and weight loss to fatigue. But some lung cancers show no symptoms at all until they’re very advanced, by which time it has usually spread to other parts of the body.
Lung cancers are either of the small-cell type or the non-small-cell type. Small-cell lung cancer is responsible for 15 percent of all cases and is most prevalent among smokers. It’s an aggressive cancer that spreads rapidly and responds best to chemotherapy.
The other three types of lung cancer are of the non-small-cell variety. The most common of these is adenocarcinoma, which accounts for 40 percent of lung cancers, is most frequently found in women, and has been linked to low-tar cigarette smoking. Squamous cell carcinom
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