The proportion of people being diagnosed with lung cancer who have never smoked is increasing, according to a new study.
The study — published Feb. 4 in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal for World Cancer Day — analyzed lung cancer cases from the Global Cancer Observatory 2022 dataset.
Researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency, found that lung cancer was the fifth largest leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide for those who have never smoked. Those cases were almost exclusively adenocarcinoma, the most dominant of the four subtypes of the disease in both men and women.
There was an estimate of 1.6 million new cases of lung cancer in men in 2022, and about 910,000 cases of lung cancer in women.
Researchers noted that as smoking prevalence has declined in many countries, the biggest contributing factor to these lung cancer cases was air pollution.
“Air pollution can be considered an important factor that partly explains the emerging predominance of adenocarcinoma that accounts for 53% to 70% of cases of lung cancer among people who have never smoked worldwide,” the study reports.
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As of 2019, nearly the entire global population lives in areas with air quality levels below standards set by the World Health Organization.
“The results provide important insights as to how both the disease and the underlying risk factors are evolving, offering clues as to how we can optimally prevent lung cancer worldwide,” Dr. Freddie Bray, head of the IARC’s cancer surveillance branch and lead author of the study, said in a release.
“Changes in smoking patterns and exposure to air pollution are among the main determinants of the changing risk profile of lung cancer incidence by subtype that we see today,” Bray said. “The diverging trends by sex in recent generations offer insights to cancer prevention specialists and policy-makers seeking to develop and implement tobacco and air pollution control strategies tailored to high-risk populations.”
Lung cancer is the overall leading cause of cancer deaths across the nation. The American Cancer Society estimates that about 226,000 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in 2025, and nearly 125,000 people will die from the disease.
And while anyone can get lung cancer despite their age, lung cancer typically occurs in older people, as most people diagnosed with the disease are aged 65 or older, per the ACS.
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