Face of lung cancer — once older men with a history of smoking — has changed significantly

Many lung cancers are now found in non-smokers, and scientists want to know why.

According to the headline of a story by Nina Agrawal and Allison Jiang in The New York Times early this week, "the face of lung cancer — once older men with a history of smoking — has changed." Significantly.

Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer in the United States, notes the article that then goes on to say that "the disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted."

Worldwide, "roughly 10 to 25 percent of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked," the piece continues, "Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50 per cent or more."

Dr. Maria Teresa Landi

The thinking used to be that smoking was "almost the only cause of lung cancer," the story quotes Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. 

Landi is studying "the role that environmental exposure, genetic mutations, or other risk factors might play. She and other researchers "have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution," Agrawal and Jiang's article states.

The piece also quotes Dr. Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology  at the Stanford University School of Medicine, to the effect that "we all still think about the Marlboro man as whaat lung cancer looks like." 

In many cases, however, that's no longer the case. "We're just baffled as to why," Wakelee adds.

One large study led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, the Times story reports, "is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 non-smokers with lung cancer from around the world."

Their latest findings from the study, dubbed Sherlock Lung and published in Nature this month, "showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution —  for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uzbekistan," the article says.

More information on the multiple kinds of cancer can be found in Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner's breast cancer, a VitalityPress book that I, Woody Weingarten, aimed at caregivers. I am, in fact, hard at work on a second edition. 

My other books are Mystery Dates — How to keep the sizzle in our relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of my newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that I co-authored with my then 8-year-old granddaughter. Check out my blog at https://woodyweingarten.com for more info on them.