Author Interviews, BMJ, Environmental Risks, Lung Cancer / 05.08.2016
Air Pollution May Shorten Lung Cancer Survival
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Sandrah P. Eckel PhD
Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine
USC Division of Biostatistics
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Lung cancer is the most common cancer and it is responsible for 1 in 5 cancer deaths. There is a growing body of evidence that ambient air pollution exposures are linked to lung cancer incidence and mortality, but the effect on survival of exposures after diagnosis are unclear. The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently classified ambient air pollution as carcinogenic. We reasoned that if air pollution drives lung cancer development, it could impact lung cancer progression—and shorten survival—through the same biological pathways.
We used 20 years of data on more than 300,000 newly diagnosed lung cancer cases from the California Cancer Registry and calculated average air pollution exposures at each patient’s residence from the date of diagnosis through the end of follow-up. We found that patients living in areas with higher pollution levels had shorter survival, particularly for patients who were diagnosed at an early stage and for those diagnosed at an early stage with adenocarcinoma histology. Interestingly, adenocarcinoma is the most common histological subtype of lung cancer in non-smokers.
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