Do women get lung cancer ?
Dr Chin Tan Min explains the risks women face and how to reduce and manage them
When one thinks about cancers in women , one tends to think of breast , uterine , and ovarian cancers . Is this association accurate ? With lung cancer being the third most common cancer in Singaporean women , some may ask if women are equally at risk of the disease as men .
Over a period of five years between 2014 and 2018 , 2,862 women in Singapore were diagnosed with lung cancer compared to 5,083 men .
In absolute numbers , the statistics for women show that fewer of them get lung cancer compared to men . They also tell us that a smaller percentage of all women get cancers , at 7.5 percent of all cancers , in contrast to 14 percent of all men with cancers . Whether this is related to a higher prevalence of smoking in men or other gender-related factors is not currently well understood . The definite risk factor of smoking for lung cancer applies to both women and men . But while men are more likely to have smoking-related lung cancer , women tend to be diagnosed more often with lung cancers that are non-smoking-related .
On the one hand , non-smokers tend to have a higher chance of harbouring certain mutations in their cancers , such as epidermal growth factor receptor ( EGFR ) and ALK fusion . The presence of these mutations or aberrations allows patients to be treated with oral targeted medications .
Smoking-related cancers , on the other hand , tend not to be driven by these mutations and hence may not be responsive to oral targeted medications . We have found , however , that smoking-related lung cancers tend to be more responsive to immunotherapy , a relatively novel group of medications that harnesses the body ’ s own immune system to help control cancers .
64 OCTOBER 2021 GlobalHealthAsiaPacific . com