The Southern European, Most Smokers
According to a report on the health of European women, there is considerable discrepancy between different European countries both in patterns of incidence and mortality due to lung cancer in relation to the smoking habits of 20 to 30 years earlier. Thus, the highest mortality trends of the European Union are located in the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Sweden and Britain. However, smoking among women is now more prevalent in southern Europe than in the north, which makes predicting an increase in mortality in Southern European countries, among which is Spain.
Also according to the report, smoking is a preventable cause of illness and death most important in Europe. The prevalence of women smokers for the period 1996-2003 ranged from 6.8% in Portugal and 32% in Austria but recent reports suggest that is increasing and is around 20% in most European countries. “In Spain, the president of SEOM highlights for the period 2002-2005, the prevalence in women was higher than 20% and most troubling, 30% in adolescents.”
Following the steady increase in the number of women diagnosed with lung cancer attending oncology consultations in recent years in Spain, in 2007 it launched a project sponsored by the Spanish Society for Medical Oncology (SEOM) and led by Drs Pilar Garrido, Dolores Isla, Enriqueta Felip and Nuria Viñolas, as oncologist lung cancer.
The project, called World 07, is a database of prospective, multicenter epidemiological and developed to collect demographic data, habits, clinical features and treatment of women diagnosed with lung cancer in 36 hospitals in Spain. The objective is to analyze a total of 2,000 patients to evaluate differences between sexes, having included from October 2007 until now over 500 patients.
The majority had adenocarcinoma histology (74%), 43% nonsmokers, 42% with a family history of cancer (one third of lung cancer), with a median survival for advanced NSCLC 17 months, confirming the better prognosis women already known from other series. A better understanding of gender differences may contribute to the administration of a therapeutic strategy that is more effective.