The relationship between air pollution and lung cancer in nonsmokers in Taiwan. - GreenMedInfo Summary
The Relationship Between Air Pollution and Lung Cancer in Nonsmokers in Taiwan.
J Thorac Oncol. 2019 05 ;14(5):784-792. Epub 2019 Jan 18. PMID: 30664991
Chien-Hua Tseng
INTRODUCTION: For never-smokers (smoked<100 lifetime cigarettes), lung cancer (LC) has emerged as an important issue. We aimed to investigate the effects of prevalence changes in tobacco smoking and particulate matter (PM) 2.5 (PM) levels on LC in Taiwan, in relation to contrasting PMlevels, between Northern Taiwan (NT) and Southern Taiwan (ST).
METHODS: We reviewed 371,084 patients with LC to assess smoking prevalence and correlations between the incidence of adenocarcinoma lung cancer (AdLC) and non-AdLC. Two subsets were selected to assess different AdLC stage trends and the effect of PMon survival of patients with AdLC.
RESULTS: From 1995 to 2015, the proportion of male adult ever-smokers decreased from 59.4% to 29.9% whereas the female smoking rate remained low (3.2% to 5.3%). AdLC incidence in males and females increased from 9.06 to 23.25 and 7.05 to 24.22 per 100,000 population, respectively. Since 1993, atmospheric visibility in NT improved (from 7.6 to 11.5 km), but deteriorated in ST (from 16.3 to 4.2 km). The annual percent change in AdLC stages IB to IV was 0.3% since 2009 (95% confidence interval [CI]: -1.9%-2.6%) in NT, and 4.6% since 2007 (95% CI: 3.3%-5.8%) in ST; 53% patients with LC had never smoked. Five-year survival rates for never-smokers, those with EGFR wild-type genes, and female patients with AdLC were 12.6% in NT and 4.5% in ST (hazard ratio: 0.79, 95% CI: 0.70-0.90).
CONCLUSIONS: In Taiwan, greater than 50% of patients with LC had never smoked. PMlevel changes can affect AdLC incidence and patient survival.