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Title: Women With Lung Cancer Appear to Have Longer Survival Than Men: Presented at CHEST

"Women With Lung Cancer Appear to Have Longer Survival Than Men: Presented at CHEST"

By Ed Susman MONTREAL, CANADA -- November 2, 2005 -- All other things being equal, a new study suggests that women diagnosed with lung cancer will outlive a man diagnosed with the same disease by as long as a year. "Even in untreated patients, women with lung cancer still live longer than men, despite the presence of other medical conditions or gender differences in life expectancy," said Juan Wisnivesky, MD, assistant professor of medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York, United States. "This suggests that the progression of lung cancer has a biological basis, with the disease being more aggressive in men than in women." Dr. Wisnivesky presented study findings on these differences here at the American College of Chest Physicians Annual Meeting (CHEST). Dr. Wisnivesky and colleagues pored over the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Eng Results (SEER) registry that is linked to Medicare records in the United States and identified 18,967 cases of stage I and II non-small-cell lung cancer diagnosed between 1991 and 1999. They looked at patients who received surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or no treatment for the disease and compared them by sex, adjusting their findings for other illnesses and general life expectancy. "We found that overall, a woman with lung cancer will live about 1 year longer than a man if surgery is performed," he said in a press briefing on October 31[^st. "If there is no treatment -- and we found 2200 such cases in the SEER registry -- women will still live about 5 to 6 months longer than men."

In patients who are treated for their disease, the 5-year lung-cancer-specific survival is 54% for women compared with 40% for men. That difference was "highly statistically significant [P < .0001]," Dr. Wisnivesky said.

W. Michael Alberts, MD, chief medical officer, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, United States, commented, "There is probably some hormonal differences between men and women that may be playing a role in survival. It is an area that deserves investigation."

Dr. Alberts moderated the press briefing in his role as president of the American College of Chest Physicians. "Physicians caring for patients with lung cancer should consider the inherent progression of lung cancer among men and women when deciding on a patient's course of treatment," he said.

[Presentation title: Gender Differences in Survival of Patients With Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer: Do Tumors Behave Differently in Women?]

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