Lung cancer threat to worsen for European women: study

Lung cancer is likely to overtake breast cancer as the main cause of cancer deaths among European women by 2015, a new study has claimed.

In the UK and Poland it has already overtaken breast cancer as the main cause of cancer deaths in women, found the study by researchers in Italy and Switzerland.

The study predicted that just over 1.3 million people will die from cancer (737,747 men and 576,489 women) in the 27 countries of the European Union in 2013.

Although the actual numbers have increased when compared with 2009 (the year for which there are World Health Organisation mortality data for most EU countries), the rate (age-standardised per 100,000 population) of people who die from the disease has declined.

Since 2009 there has been 6 per cent fall among men and 4 per cent fall among women.
However, despite the decline in cancer deaths overall, lung cancer death rates continue to rise among women in all countries, while breast cancer rates fall.

In 2013 there will be an estimated 88,886 deaths (14.6 per 100,000 women) from breast cancer and 82,640 deaths (14 per 100,000 women) from lung cancer. Lung cancer deaths have risen by 7 per cent among women since 2009.

"If these opposite trends in breast and lung cancer rates continue, then in 2015 lung cancer is going to become the first cause of cancer mortality in Europe.

This is already true in the UK and Poland, the two countries with the highest rates: 21.2 and 17.5 per 100,000 women respectively," said one of the study's authors, Professor Carlo La Vecchia from the University of Milan (Italy).

"Fewer young women nowadays in the UK and elsewhere in Europe are smoking and, therefore, deaths from lung cancer may start to level off after 2020 at around 15 per 100,000 women," Vecchia said in a statement.

Deaths from breast cancer have been declining steadily, with a 7 per cent fall in rates since 2009 in the EU.

Although lung cancer is still the main cause of cancer death among men, with nearly 187,000 deaths predicted for 2013, giving a death rate of 37.2 per 100,000 men, this represents a 6 per cent fall since 2009.

The study looked at cancer rates in the whole of the EU (27 member states as at 2007) and also in six individual countries - France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK - for all cancers, and, individually, for stomach, intestine, pancreas, lung, prostate, breast, uterus (including cervix) and leukemias.

The study was published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology.