12 votes

Lung cancer rates rising among non-smoking women

Posted by boxer_dogs_dance
Tags: cancer.lung, gender, women, pollution.air, author.anna moore, source.the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/14/lung-cancer-young-fit-non-smoking-women

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Title
'I kept asking: "Why? What did I do?"' How come so many young, fit, non-smoking women are getting lung cancer?
Authors
Anna Moore
Published
Sep 14 2025
Word count
2175 words

4 comments

  1. [3]
    CannibalisticApple
    Link
    I wish people would drop the mindset of certain diseases or medical conditions having "minimum ages". I get it's more statistically likely for some conditions to occur at older ages, but I don't...

    I wish people would drop the mindset of certain diseases or medical conditions having "minimum ages". I get it's more statistically likely for some conditions to occur at older ages, but I don't think it's a hard and fast rule for any physical health issue. (Well, minus perhaps some dependent on physical maturation, such as endometriosis.) That attitude leads to all sorts of pain and suffering because even doctors will dismiss certain possibilities rather than do any testing.

    I especially loathe how little research is done into women's health. Symptoms can present very differently between men and women, and so can reactions to treatments and medicines. I'll never forget a segment on 60 Minutes where they mentioned how researchers preferred testing on male lab rats/mice because they didn't have the "pesky hormones" and had more consistent responses.

    Combine those two factors, and countless young women will and have died from conditions usually associated with old men. People need to just accept that pretty much anything is possible. The human body is ridiculously complex, frankly I find it amazing that birth defects and mutations can be so "uniform" to have widespread syndromes given the potentially infinite ways something can go wrong.

    13 votes
    1. [2]
      snake_case
      Link Parent
      Its cause its more difficult to do research on females and so people just don’t, and get the same funding either way.

      Its cause its more difficult to do research on females and so people just don’t, and get the same funding either way.

      1. DefinitelyNotAFae
        Link Parent
        This reminded me how being called or referred to as a "female" makes me think the speaker/writer is a Ferengi. Idk if you were referencing the mice or the humans, but it was an involuntary...

        This reminded me how being called or referred to as a "female" makes me think the speaker/writer is a Ferengi.

        Idk if you were referencing the mice or the humans, but it was an involuntary shudder.

        Medical sexism and medical racism have caused so many deaths. I am at least inspired to see if someone is counting them. "Excess deaths" is not an area I've dug into but it may be my new rabbit hole.

        2 votes