Almost half of all lung cancer patients in Taiwan do not smoke.
15th in the world.
You’ve made a valiant effort to resuscitate this depressing thread. Yes it is sad to hear about early 20s ladies who never smoked a cigarette in their lives dying in a hospice. Purely genetic
So might as well smoke?
Anyone who works at a breakfast place is bound to end up with it.
Best not. Smoking gives you cancer
Well that cheered me up.
It’s seems the rate in Taiwan is extraordinarily high for non smokers. I checked the stats for smoking to exclude that bias and there are actually more smokers per head in Taiwan than the UK.
Cos Taiwan has its head up it’s ass in not investigating locally caused diseases (rather they are blindly copying the western world with a singular emphasis on smoking reduction ), you get this result…
Peake said that in the U.K. alone, nearly 6,000 people who have never smoked die of lung cancer annually, which represents about 15% of total lung cancer fatalities.
The authors note that lung cancer in never-smokers is the eighth most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the U.K., with a greater mortality rate than lymphoma, leukemia, ovarian cancer, or cervical cancer.
“Globally, there is wide variation in the proportion of lung cancers in never-smokers, in the range of 10% to 25%,” Peake, Cosford, and colleagues wrote. “With declining rates of smoking, the relative proportion of lung cancers in never-smokers are increasing and this does not appear to be confounded by passive smoking or misreported smoking status.”
http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/29/2/725.full
The two leading causes of lung cancer seem to be smoking and genetics.
You have control over whether you smoke. But your genes are what they are.
I wonder if there are location differences statistics like between Chunghua and Hualien.
Yea there are I read it before, somewhere like Pingdong or Tainan or Changhua was the worst.
Here’s a good paper on the link between PM2.5 and local cancer rates. They also have maps that show the SW of Taiwan has the highest rates. Surprise surprise…
(It would be best if I can find for just lung cancer as generally cancer is also related to aging population…Cancer is very much a disease of aging)
I think this is the study you’re looking for.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30664991/
People in South Taiwan who are genetically susceptible to lung cancer are more likely to contact lung cancer than people with similar genes and live in North Taiwan.
Note that genetics has a huge part to play. A lot of people mistakenly think that smoking, air pollution, etc. cause lung cancer. They only increase your risk if you’re already genetically at risk.
i bet you 1ntd that gain disagrees
This is a great point that I need to research more (it’s probably related to DNA repair and the two hit hypothesis ?).
It means then that the population should all be genetically screened and stratified for high risk and low risk for lung cancer (and possibly other cancers).
Then the high risk group undergo screening every year (as long as it wasn’t adding to their risk by dosing them with too much radiation).
We can cut our risk by not smoking, but we need the government to act in enforcing laws to reduce air pollution.
I just went to my fellow college student’s funeral. This malaise took him too soon. No smoker, outdoorsy type. Very slow and painful death.
Torch passed away from.cancer but his legend Captain Air lives on.