Death rate dips for women with lung cancer

WASHINGTON — For the first time, women's death rates from lung cancer

are dropping, possibly a turning point in the smoking-fueled epidemic.

It's a small decline, says the nation's annual report on cancer — just
under 1 percent a year. And lung cancer remains the nation's, and the
world's, leading cancer killer. But the long-anticipated drop — coming
more than a decade after a similar decline began in U.S. men — is a
hopeful sign.

"It looks like we've turned the corner," said Elizabeth Ward of the
American Cancer Society, who co-authored Thursday's report. "We think
this downward trend is real, and we think it will continue."

Overall, death rates from cancer have been inching down for years,
thanks mostly to gains against some leading types — colorectal,
breast, prostate and, in men, lung cancer. Preventing cancer is better
than treating it, and the country has documented smaller but real
declines in new cases as well.

The report shows death rates falling an average of 1.6 percent a year
between 2003 and 2007, the latest data available. Rates of new
diagnoses declined nearly 1 percent a year, researchers reported in
the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

But progress is mixed, with diagnoses and deaths still rising for
other cancer types, including melanoma, liver, kidney and pancreatic
cancer.

Moreover, cancer is primarily a disease of older adults and the
population is graying rapidly, a challenge in maintaining the gains.

Lung cancer is expected to kill more than 159,000 Americans this year,
nearly 70,500 of them women. So even a small improvement in survival
is welcome, and can add up over time, said Ward.

Smoking became rampant among men long before women, and thus men's
lung cancer deaths soared first. But in the early 1990s, death rates
began dropping among men as older smokers died and fewer younger men
took up the habit. Those rates were dropping 3 percent a year between
2005 and 2007, the new report said.

Researchers had long anticipated the same pattern would appear among
women, and had been tracking signs that women's death rates had begun
inching down for a few years. AP