Worldwide, as women are given political and social freedoms, they pick up smoking. We are now seeing this play out in Asia and Africa. So, if you look at Japan, for example, this is a country with a culture in which women did not smoke for years. There is a study that actually showed that the smoking rate in women doubled over 10 years, from 9 to 18 percent, when tobacco advertising increased in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
Do women have different smoking habits than men?
Observational studies have shown that women tend to use smoking as an outlet or as stress relief, so they'll have a quick cigarette. They probably smoke differently than men do, because it is a quick cigarette. They inhale more deeply and more quickly, so they may be prone to a different carcinogen exposure than men, because if you smoke really deeply, you affect some of your more distal airways, which are farther from the major airways. Men may have a slower, more lingering approach.
How have the trends in lung cancer deaths changed?
For many years, most of us felt that lung cancer was a disease of smoking men in their '60s and '70s. But starting in the 1980s, a vast number of women were diagnosed with lung cancer. If you really look back, so there's been a 600 percent increase in death rates from lung cancer in women since 1930.
In 1987, the lung cancer death rates in women exceeded breast cancer death rates and have been climbing since then. Most recently, we've found that more women die from lung cancer than from breast and ovarian cancer combined.
