Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers
It was Jimmy Carter days and the OPEC Oil crisis. Prior to 1973... electricity and heating oil was cheap, there were many single pane windows that didn't seal completely. So the default condition was houses as originally built, cooler temps in Winter and more natural ventilation in houses with corresponding higher energy costs.
In 1973 fears that heating in Winter would get more expensive, saw an increase in home renovation. IR viewers were employed for the first time and IR images showed windows and attic vents as glowing with heat (as they had all along) and it looked like money escaping. Rubber seals on doors and windows. Double pane windows.
This trapped the radon in basements (and for some rising out of the basement onto the first floor) to be breathed by humans and gain higher concentrations for the first time in US history. Homes were hermetically sealed.
Since smokers bore the penance of sin... the rise of the '2nd leading cause' went unrecognized for years.
The second leading cause of lung cancer is radon. My high schooler came home and said her science teacher said everyone should do a radon test. I scoffed, but humored her by getting a kit from Home Depot and sending it away to a lab. The results came back very high. So I purchased an electronic radon monitor and it showed almost the exact same results. Well, crap. I installed a radon mitigation system and now the numbers are almost nil.
I think a large contributor is poor indoor air quality - of all types, not just one specific pollutant - causing inflammation and thus cancer. Homes have gotten far tighter in recent years, and people buy ever more cheap furniture and inexpensive consumer products. So you have formaldehyde and other VOCs off-gassing, you have plasticizer vapors, nanoplastics in the air from synthetic furniture and cloth, you have refrigerants leaking from appliances and from insulation foam… I don’t think nearly anyone understands just how many unique poorly-studied chemicals are emitted into your indoor air by your average set of household products. That’s all to say nothing of common and better-understood air quality issues from gas cooking, radon, mold, etc.
So we have all these irritants in the air, and we have the most airtight homes in human history by orders of magnitude… what did we think was going to happen? That you could slap a laughably undersized carbon filter on an air purifier and call it good? Or that a limited number of too-small ERV systems would help? At some point we will need a radical rethinking of our approach to health and safety of new technology.
Are lung cancer rates up? Obviously eliminating or reducing the primary cause will lead to larger percentages of the other causes among cases.
Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"
I wonder if that's really true.
Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.
>Studies have also shown that people who don’t smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Ms. Chen and Ms. Liu — both of Ms. Liu’s grandfathers had the disease — are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr. Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif.
Couldn't this be secondhand smoke?
I'm not sure why this isn't recognized as a great success.
Once a large enough portion of the population were no longer smokers, it was inevitable that many lung cancers would be in smokers. What is important in all of this is not "large sounding numbers" of people, but the percentage of the population, as a whole, who suffer from lung cancer. And a further confounding factor life expectancy today vs even 30 years ago (the longer one lives, the more likely it is for cancer of any kind to develop).
I can think of a few hypothesis, but I’d hit all the reasons we already know that people in their 30s are getting cancer first, like:
Natural gas burning inside with poor ventilation (solve by pushing electric everything, paid for by carbon tax paid by big oil)
ICE car exhaust (solve with EVs, subsidised by carbon tax paid by big oil)
Second hand smoke (ban smoking in public and within XX distance of a child, and make support for parents to quit free from cigarette taxes)
Microplastics in the water and the air including tyre dust (start regulating this/coming up with a long term plan to reduce it and filter it out, and put a government subsidy on certified and professionally installed under sink microplastic water filter products… paid for by those who put the plastic there in the first place)
Poor indoor air quality/high VOX (mandate air flow minimum levels for all new builds and make extraction fans for offices a normal requirement, and give tenants something to lobby against their body corporate to improve airflow in uselessly designed buildings since “sick building syndrome” is real but often impossible to know before you sign the papers)
This challenges our previous understanding of lung cancer risks, since we’ve always thought it mostly affected smokers. I’m curious how much is due to environmental pollution or other exposures, and how much is genetic. Hopefully, this will push for more research and better screening methods for everyone.
I used to live by a busy street in a semi-dense part of town. Cars would be going around 45mph.
When I moved from that apartment after 4 years. I was shocked by the amount of black dust covering everything. from the walls to the shelves and floors. I think it was all tire pollution so switching to 100% electric won't mitigate.
It was pretty shocking and I wondered how much i increased my risk for lung cancer or other cancers.
Dropping at the root since some threads are talking about radon and whether it’s based on region.
This is the EPA map for radon risks (zones) in the US:
https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-05/radon-zon...
Lung cancer screening should be used more broadly and improved over time in a data driven fashion!
We can catch things early, it shouldn’t be limited to only for smokers.
Its pollution, I door and outdoor, chemical and combustion.
It happens more in women, especially in countries with traditional gender roles. They are doing more cooking in the kitchen where there is fire.
Not being a scientist of any kind, I fully believe it is fossil fuel emissions, mainly from autos.
When I was very young, where I lived, a city of 100000, I would say less than 50% of the people there drove plus most worked in the city they lived in. Now, almost every household has at least 2 autos and most drive at least 10+ (16km) miles to work.
But, I also wonder if this is tied to the general increase in cancers for people under 50.
Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50 percent or more.
I suspect certain perfumes may be causing it.
Related from last year, similar asian women angle for whatever reason:
Asian American women are getting lung cancer despite never smoking
> Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Ky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. “Go home and get your affairs in order,” Ms. Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13 and 14.
(One of many cases mentioned in the article.)
Before you head for the lab, to start researching "why" - maybe you should tighten up the standards for diagnosis and testing? That could enormously improve the qualities & quantities of life for a huge number of patients.
> The thinking used to be that smoking was “almost the only cause of lung cancer,” said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.
Well, that tells a lot: overfocusing on a single cause because it is obvious and major. Well, let us hope the medical science learns this lesson.
ETA: not that I blame them, it is a reasonable attitude but not so good in science.
Not jumping the paywall but I'd guess that because relatively nobody smokes cigarettes anymore, cases of lung cancer with other causes are now more of what doctors are seeing.
Non-paywall: https://archive.ph/nsMoH
Site is flagged as it hosts pedop. material.
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> Many Lung Cancers Are Now in Nonsmokers. Scientists Want to Know Why
Because hypocrisy does not live long. They blamed cigarettes for lung cancer, ignoring all other causes. "Oh, you have cancer but didn't smoke ? You surely were inhaling cigarettes smoke from somebody else.". We can polute further with no repercursions.
Non-paywall: https://archive.ph/nsMoH