Fewer smoking, but lung cancer still on rise
Reported April 23, 2010The numbers seem contradictory: Despite a year-by-year drop in the percentage of smokers in Japan, the number of people who die of lung cancer is increasing.
But according to experts, it will just be a matter of time before the numbers work themselves out.
Tobacco contains numerous cancer-causing substances. Medical experts blame tobacco as causing one-third of cancer cases.
Lung cancer has particularly close links with smoking. Male smokers are 4.4 times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers, and female smokers 2.8 times more likely than nonsmokers.
In 1960, slightly more than 5,000 people died of lung cancer in this country. In 1998, lung cancer replaced stomach cancer as the most common cause of cancer-induced death. More than 50,000 died of lung caner that year.
The death toll from lung cancer climbed in 2008 to about 67,000 people – even as the number of smokers in the nation has continued to decrease.
Yumiko Mochizuki, leader of a project to study tobacco-related policies at the National Cancer Center, said the apparent anomaly in the numbers was to be expected.
“Cancer is a disease in which normal cells slowly turn into cancer cells,” Mochizuki said. “It’ll take time until the effects of the falling percentage of smokers surface.”
The United States was the first nation that warned of tobacco’s health dangers. From the mid-1960s, tobacco consumption began decreasing, but it was not until the 1990 – about 25 years later – that the United States’ mortality rate from lung cancer began falling.
The percentage of Japanese men who light up has gradually dropped year-by-year since the mid-1960s, and fell to 39 percent in 2009. However, the increase in overall domestic tobacco consumption only started slowing in the mid-1990s.
“Judging by the U.S. example, it’ll probably take another 10 years until Japan’s lung cancer mortality rate starts to fall,” Mochizuki said.
The percentage of male smokers in Japan remains stubbornly high compared with men in Western industrialized countries. More than 40 percent of Japanese men in their 20s to 50s smoke.
The percentage of people who died of lung cancer is lower among those born in the late 1930s. People in this generation reached adulthood in the chaotic years after World War II, a time when tobacco was difficult to obtain.
The biggest factor in the increase of lung cancer deaths is that Japanese today in general live longer.
Looking at age-adjusted cancer mortality rates, in which effects of the aging of society are excluded, men’s mortality rate from lung cancer has fallen since the latter half of the 1990s.
But some medical experts predict the figure will rise again because more people who were born in the 1940s–and entered adulthood when tobacco was more readily available–will develop lung cancer.
Kicking the smoking habit can bring health benefits more quickly on a personal level. According to studies by international institutes, the risk of developing lung cancer falls in five to 10 years after quitting. The longer a person stopped smoking, the larger the fall in the risk of lung cancer.
Akira Oshima, chief of a center that assists cancer patients of the Osaka Medical Center for Cancer and Cardiovascular Diseases, believes more must be done to stop people lighting up.
“Tobacco prices should continue to be raised drastically, and smoking should be banned in workplaces and public places,” he said.
Source : Asia News
