Age at lung cancer diagnosis in females versus males who never smoke by race and ethnicity.
- Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, MD, USA. batel.blechter@nih.gov.
- Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, MD, USA.
- Institute of Population Health Sciences, National Health Research Institutes, Zhunan, Taiwan.
- Division of Genome Biology, National Cancer Center Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan.
- Division of Epidemiology, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
- National Institute of Cancer Research, National Health Research Institutes, Zhunan, Taiwan.
- Department of Epidemiology, Shanghai Cancer Institute, Shanghai, China.
- Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
- Center for Integrated Health Care Research, Kaiser Permanente Hawai'i, Honolulu, HI, USA.
- Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute, Sutter Health, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
- Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
- Department of Population Science, American Cancer Society, Kennesaw, GA, USA.
- University of Hawaii Cancer Center, Honolulu, HI, USA.
BACKGROUND: We characterized age at diagnosis and estimated sex differences for lung cancer and its histological subtypes among individuals who never smoke.
METHODS: We analyzed the distribution of age at lung cancer diagnosis in 33,793 individuals across 8 cohort studies and two national registries from East Asia, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). Student's t-tests were used to assess the study population differences (Δ years) in age at diagnosis comparing females and males who never smoke across subgroups defined by race/ethnicity, geographic location, and histological subtypes.
RESULTS: We found that among Chinese individuals diagnosed with lung cancer who never smoke, females were diagnosed with lung cancer younger than males in the Taiwan Cancer Registry (n = 29,832) (Δ years = -2.2 (95% confidence interval (CI):-2.5, -1.9), in Shanghai (n = 1049) (Δ years = -1.6 (95% CI:-2.9, -0.3), and in Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente Hawai'i in the US (n = 82) (Δ years = -11.3 (95% CI: -17.7, -4.9). While there was a suggestion of similar patterns in African American and non-Hispanic White individuals. the estimated differences were not consistent across studies and were not statistically significant.
CONCLUSIONS: We found evidence of sex differences for age at lung cancer diagnosis among individuals who never smoke.