Medicine: Cancer & Women Smokers

In the battle over the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer, one of the chief arguments on the negative side has been put as a question: Why don’t as many women get lung cancer as men? The answer, says Dr. Ernest L. Wynder of Manhattan’s Sloan-Kettering Institute, and chief developer of the cigarette lung cancer theory, is that women by and large do not smoke as much as men.

In the early 1900s lung cancer was a rare disease, but equally prevalent among men and women, Dr. Wynder told a Brooklyn meeting of the American Chemical Society. By 1954 the overall lung cancer death rate had increased twenty-fold among men, only fourfold among women (21,000 and 4,000 deaths respectively). Dr. Wynder and two colleagues compared the smoking histories of women with lung cancer,(105 cases) with those of women (the same ages) without cancer. Of the cancer victims, 61% were smokers as compared with only 29% among the cancer-free. Among the former, ten times as many had a history of heavy smoking, i.e., more than a pack a day. Dr. Wynder’s gloomy conclusion: because more women are smoking heavily today, they will be stricken by a sharp increase in lung cancer in 20 to 25 years.