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Differences in Patient Treatment Outcomes by Gender
The following is the edited transcript and figures from a webinar presentation made by Dr. Heather Wakelee, medical oncologist and Associate Professor at Stanford Cancer Center, on Never-Smokers and Gender Differences in Lung Cancer.
There has been a lot of historical data showing that women with lung cancer do better than men with lung cancer, and we don’t really know why, but this has been seen over and over again. These are some earlier trials; one was looking at the registry data (SEER) showing that women with lung cancer did better than men, and another trial done at the Mayo Institute showing that again women do better than men by a small percentage, but a definite statistically significant improvement. Continue reading
Gender Differences in Risk for Lung Cancer
The following is the edited transcript and figures from a webinar presentation made by Dr. Heather Wakelee, medical oncologist and Associate Professor at Stanford Cancer Center, on Never-Smokers and Gender Differences in Lung Cancer.
Let’s move to biological differences of risk of lung cancer between men and women.
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In the table above, this gets right at the question of whether there’s an increase risk of smoking for women versus men. This is some of the data that we have from some of the larger trials, very different types of studies, some were case-control studies where if someone developed lung cancer the investigators would find similar people who matched in every way except that they didn’t have cancer, and then others were cohort studies, in which a large cohort, a defined population, was followed closely over time. Continue reading
Assessing the Causes of Lung Cancer in Never-Smokers
The following is the edited transcript and figures from a webinar presentation made by Dr. Heather Wakelee, medical oncologist and Associate Professor at Stanford Cancer Center, on Never-Smokers and Gender Differences in Lung Cancer.
The real question, of course, is why do people get lung cancer who have never smoked? We don’t really know. We think it could be related to second hand smoke, and perhaps it’s happening in childhood even more so. It might be from vehicle exhaust, and a lot of work is being done there. Cooking fumes have been the culprit in several studies, especially in poorly ventilated kitchens. Occupational exposures including paint in a recent analysis. Radon exposure is a big risk and something especially in the mountain states, people look at radon levels in their house and important, and that can be a thing to test for.
There are a lot of environmental toxins, such as asbestos and arsenic, and then there’s a family risk. It’s much, much lower when we talk about cancer risks like colon cancer families and breast cancer families. It’s not of that magnitude, but there certainly are families where lung cancer tends to run in the family. We see this especially when the lung cancer is diagnosed very early, there’s been a hint that certain genes might be related to family lung cancer — but we have a lot of work still to do on that.
Overall, though, we don’t quite know the reasons why people get lung cancer, but we are starting to understand more about what has happened on a molecular basis, especially in people who never smoked but develop lung cancer.
(Click on image to enlarge)
Introduction to Lung Cancer in Never-Smokers
The following is the edited transcript and figures from a webinar presentation made by Dr. Heather Wakelee, medical oncologist and Associate Professor at Stanford Cancer Center, on Never-Smokers and Gender Differences in Lung Cancer.
I’ll start with the association of lung cancer with smoking.
(click on image to enlarge)
There is no doubt that smoking remains the biggest risk of lung cancer, and what this slide is showing in the green is cigarette consumption and how that started off in the 1900s, gradually increasing until the 1960s ,when the public first became aware of the health risks and as that dropped, lung cancer deaths also started to drop but obviously trailed that.
The gray line is the men, showing that men led early smoking cessation efforts and stopped, and so the death rates in men dropped as the cigarette smoking dropped. Unfortunately for women, we were a little slower to hear that message about health risks from smoking, and we’re only now starting to see a tapering off of lung cancer in women. Still a little bit lower than men, but a real risk.
Systemic Therapy for Patients with Early-Stage Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer
Introduction to Adjuvant Therapy: Why More than Just Surgery?
For patients with early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (stages I, II and some III), surgical resection (removal by surgery) is the standard treatment. Unfortunately, the rates of recurrence (cancer returning) after resection can be high, and additional therapy (chemotherapy) can improve the odds that the cancer won’t return for some patients. This article goes through the data we have that demonstrate the benefit of chemotherapy after surgery for early stage lung cancer, information about chemotherapy before surgery, new treatments being studied for lung cancer patients after surgery and ongoing studies to help better determine which patients might benefit the most from particular treatments. We have learned about the importance of chemotherapy and other treatment after surgery from patients who were willing to go on clinical trials. Patients on the trials either received new treatments or were randomized (assigned by chance) to either get chemotherapy or not after surgery. The information below comes from the analyses that have been done of the patients who were willing to participate in clinical trials.
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