Wellness experts have deemed lung cancer to be the new leading cause of female cancer death in Europe. According to the Annals of Oncology, lung cancer has already overtaken breast cancer here in the UK and in Poland, and experts have surmised this is due to the surge in the number of women who started smoking in the 1960s and 1970s.
For the next few years, researchers have found that the lung cancer death rate will continue on its upward trend, however, as fewer young European women now start to smoke, their wellbeing is less at risk to the disease and therefore it should decrease with time. This year, roughly 88,886 European women will die from breast cancer, while 82,640 will die from lung cancer, but Professor Carlo La Vecchia and colleagues state that the balance will have shifted by 2013 and lung cancer will take over.
To come to this conclusion, the team examined the cancer rates of the EU’s 27 member states collectively, as well as individually in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK. They did this for cancers as a whole, and specifically for cancers of stomach, intestine, pancreas, lung, prostate, breast, uterus (including cervix) and leukaemia.
They found that, because people are living longer, more and more of them are developing the disease, yet fewer are dying from it. As well as the rising level of lung cancer incidences among EU women, the lack of effective treatments for pancreatic cancer has meant that the number of pancreatic cancer deaths among both men and women also shows no sign of decreasing.
According to Professor La Vecchia, of the University of Milan, Italy, ‘This is worrying. It is the single major cancer that does not show any signs of declining in the future, despite fewer people smoking. Smoking and diabetes account for about a third of cases. But we do not know what causes most of the rest. But for lung cancer, we expect death rates to start to go down in around 2020 or 2025 now that the new generation of women are smoking less.’
Sarah Williams, of Cancer Research UK, commented, ‘It’s encouraging to see that overall the rate of people dying from cancer in Europe is predicted to continue falling. This reflects improvements in what we know about how to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer and shows that through research we are making inroads against the disease. But deaths from lung cancer in women are still rising, reflecting smoking rates in previous decades, so sadly most of these deaths were avoidable.’ She added, ‘Every year 157,000 children in the UK alone, start smoking. We must try to stem that tide.’
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