India may see 7-fold rise in lung cancer cases by 2025: Study
India is likely to witness an over seven-fold rise in lung cancer cases by 2025 compared to the situation a decade ago, researchers from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) reported, lamenting the lack of a population-level screening tool to identify such patients.
What is worse is that nearly 45% of lung cancer patients are diagnosed at a time when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body.
Indians are generally diagnosed in their mid-50s, which is a decade earlier than the western population.
“In 75% of cases, lung cancer is detected between stage-3 and stage-4, leading to poor outcomes. Death rates are high and survival rate poor,” Prashant Mathur, lead author of the study and director of ICMR’s National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research, Bengaluru, told DH.
Mathur and colleagues collected the cancer data from 28 population-based and 58 hospital-based cancer registries. They found records of 22,645 lung cancer patients between 2012 and 2016.
This number, according to the study, will go up to over 1.61 lakh in 2025 with an estimated 81,000 plus cases among males and 30,000 among females — a seven-fold jump.
“Rising incidences and delayed diagnosis are of grave concern,” the team reported in the latest issue of Indian Journal of Medical Research.
The researchers looked at the lung cancer trend in five big cities where cancer registries were functioning for the last four decades.
Between 1982 and 2016, the cases among males were on a steady rise in Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai while it fell in Mumbai and Bhopal. Among women, it’s an increasing trend in all cities barring Bhopal.
While the registries do not identify the reasons behind the trend, Mathur said tobacco use and air pollution, both indoor and outdoor, were driving it. An equally important role is being played by exposure to secondary smoke.
More than half of the lung cases in females and one third of the cases in males are adenocarcinoma, a type of cancer which starts in the glands that line the inside of one of your organs. Adenocarcinoma constitutes the highest proportion of cancers in all the age groups, up to 54 years in males and 74 years in females.
About one-third of the cases (36.5%) in males and females (31.7%) were recorded in the age group of 55-64. Also, nearly 77% of the recorded cases are among males.
Misdiagnosis is the major problem in detecting the disease at an early stage as the symptoms are often mistaken as those of pulmonary tuberculosis. “Doctors must remember that lung cancer can hide behind TB-like symptoms,” said Mathur.
“Unfortunately, there is no cost-effective screening method that can be implemented at the population level,” he said.
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