Lung cancer death rates down for men, up for women, cancer society reports

TORONTO (CP) -- While the lung cancer death rate for men has decreased in the last 15 years, it has increased alarmingly for women in the same period, the Canadian Cancer Society said Wednesday.

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths for men and women, but the death rate for men has dropped 17 per cent since 1988 while it has increased 46 per cent for women.

"What we are seeing now in terms of lung cancer is the result of smoking patterns prior to the late 1980s," said Dr. Barbara Whylie, the society's director of cancer control policy.

She said men took up smoking in a big way earlier than women did. By the mid-'60s the number of men smoking started to decrease while smoking among women increased until the late '80s.

The good news is overall cancer death rates for men and women have dropped in the last 15 years, and the society predicts further drops in the future. But the gender divide remains. Death rates dropped by 12 per cent for men and 3.1 per cent for women. The death rate refers to the number of people per 100,000.

Overall cancer rates for men have dropped by 4.2 per cent since 1988, while it has increased 3.5 per cent for women largely due to lung and breast cancer.

As lung cancer rates are linked to smoking, with a lag time of about 25 years, Whylie said the good news is "since women's smoking rates have declined, we can predict that over the next decade we'll start to see lung cancer rates for women decline as well."

Even though smoking rates are declining and lung cancer rates will follow, Garfield Mahood, executive director of the Non-Smokers' Rights Association, believes that isn't good enough.

Especially since teenagers, even though they are armed with the statistics and information about tobacco, are still taking up smoking.

"Why would kids take adults seriously about the risks when they go into the tens of thousands of corner stores across this country and see power walls of cigarettes -- a product that kills one out of two of its long-term users," Mahood said Wednesday.

"Those power walls are positioned next to the candy. Why would kids think that this is really a product that carries serious risks? Governments don't care about these kids and we aren't holding governments responsible and forcing them to care."

Whylie said lung cancer is particularly serious because it is preventable and those who developed it will die, while the survival rates for other cancers have improved. For example, the rates for breast cancer have not changed much in the last 15 years but the death rate has dropped.

"That means 20 per cent more people are surviving breast cancer now than 15 years ago, and you see the same pattern for prostate cancer," said Whylie.

Still the most common types of cancers continue to be breast cancer for women and prostate cancer for men.