U.S. lung cancer rates vary by subtype, sex, race/ethnicity, and age
Overall, lung cancer rates are declining in the United States, but little is known about trends related to different subtypes of lung cancer and different demographic groups. To investigate, Denise Riedel Lewis, PhD, MPH, of the National Cancer Institute, and her colleagues analyzed information from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. Their goal was to update the classification of lung cancer subtypes and to determine the rates of lung cancer overall as well as the rates of squamous cell, small cell, adenocarcinoma, large cell, other, and unspecified carcinomas among US whites and blacks diagnosed from 1977 to 2010 and white non-Hispanics, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and white Hispanics diagnosed from 1992 to 2010. The researchers found that squamous and small cell carcinoma rates declined since the 1990s, although less rapidly among females than males…