| 
USA Today,
March 8, 2006
By Rita Rubin
The death of Dana Reeve on Monday serves
as a reminder of one of lung cancer’s tragic truths.
“If there was no smoking there
would still be lung cancer,” says University of
Pittsburgh lung cancer researcher Jill Siegfried. In
fact, she says even if no American ever smoked, lung
cancer would still be the fourth-most-commonly diagnosed
malignancy in the USA.
And 85% of non-smokers diagnosed with
lung cancer - including, by all accounts, Reeve - are
women, Siegfried says. One out of five women with lung
cancer never smoked, compared with one out of 10 men
with lung cancer.
In general, fewer women than men smoke,
but that doesn’t fully explain why lung cancer
patients who never smoked are overwhelmingly female,
Siegfried says.
Although lung cancer kills about 15,000 female non-smokers
in the USA each year, “when many people, both
doctors and non-doctors, think about lung cancer, the
face they see is an older, smoking man,” says
Joan Schiller, a lung cancer doctor at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. Frustrated with the lack of attention
to women with lung cancer, Schiller founded Women Against
Lung Cancer four years ago; she is the organization’s
president.
Schiller notes that women represent about
40% of lung cancer patients, “and nobody talks
about it or wants to talk about it.”
Researchers have only recently begun investigating
why women who have never smoked are more likely to develop
lung cancer than their male counterparts. Studies of
mice suggest that estrogen may play a role, Schiller
says.
About 95% of lung cancers in both sexes have estrogen
receptors, Siegfried says.
She and Schiller are involved in research
looking at whether Faslodex, an anti-estrogen drug used
to treat metastatic breast cancers that contain estrogen
receptors, might be effective against metastatic lung
cancers in women.
Genetics also might play a role in lung
cancer risk. Just months before Reeve was diagnosed,
her mother died of ovarian cancer. Siegfried says her
research has found a disproportionate number of breast
and ovarian cancers among the relatives of women with
lung cancer.
Lung cancer itself appears to run in the
Scarangello family. Joan Scarangello McNeive never smoked,
but she died in 2001 at age 47, just nine months after
she was diagnosed with lung cancer. McNeive died 20
years after her mother, who also never smoked, died
at age 50, also just nine months after being diagnosed
with lung cancer.
When McNeive was diagnosed, her family
realized that “nothing had changed in 20 years,”
says her brother’s wife, Roxanne Donovan, a founding
board member of Joan’s Legacy, a New York-based
non-profit group that has awarded $1.3 million for lung
cancer research.
“There was nothing they could do
for Joan,” Donovan says. “There was nothing
they could do for her mother.”
|
