15
votes
Lung cancer rates rising among 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
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.
I just want to cosign how women's health is absolutely ignored by much of medical research. And when research is done it's mostly "don't do anything during pregnancy that might make your body less than a perfect shrine for the fetus" leading to people having highly restrictive diets, cutting lifesaving medications, and soon, not having literally any pain meds to take (See Tylenol being tied to autism but the government when it's basically the only recommended pain medication for pregnant people)
It's a really hard problem. There's no good way to really ensure things are safe for expecting mothers except dose a bunch of them and see if anything happens to the fetus, which is often not a road people want to go down for obvious reasons. There are tests that are performed to flag teratogenicity, but the body is a complex system that we don't fully understand. In terms on morality, the potential harm needs to be balanced against the potential good, so if there's any indication whatsoever of possible teratogenicity you might still feel like you need to exclude certain populations to help others. I guess my point is that although it is a kind of sexism, it's wholly due to practicality rather than malice or profit-maximizing. Drug companies would really prefer not to have to exclude significant populations on their drug labels. It's unfair that women have to work harder to make babies or just deal with the capability to make babies in the first place (periods and such), so life is sexist to begin with.
Pain is an interesting example. It's hard to test acute pain in the clinic without using elective procedures, so the trials for a new pain drug approved earlier this year used abdominoplasties (tummy tucks) and bunionectomies. This meant that the study population was almost all women, so it's men that we don't understand the effects on for this drug. Since the drug is being prescribed to the general public, I guess we'll find out soon.
Pain meds are specifically an example I'm using during pregnancy, though women and black people are both typically under medicated for pain due to a perception of higher pain tolerances. (See IUD insertion)
I know that testing drugs during pregnancy is a more complex medical issue but the inability to even get a sense of when during gestation certain things are a risk, and a total inability to manage certain mental health and medical conditions due to pregnancy being a contraindication puts so many more adults at risk with no resolution other than "hopefully you won't kill yourself or die, or hurt too much." It circles back around to how the fetus is considered the priority over the
incubatorparent by society and the medical field.It's a frustrating situation, but given that the fetus is very often considered the greater priority by the "incubator" themselves, I'm not sure how we can solve this problem until we get better
ex-vivomodels for this kind of thing.Mostly just addressing the idea that society and drug developers are ignoring this important issue. It's a topic that gets a lot of attention during drug development. It's more that we haven't thought of a moral way to solve the problem.
Edit: realized that specifying ex-vivo could imply use of fetal tissue, which I didn't mean to do. Could be any models, really, as long as they're good.
Its cause its more difficult to do research on females and so people just don’t, and get the same funding either way.
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.
FEmAles hahaha yeah that was on purpose kind of tongue in cheek
It wasn’t an excuse, but an observation from having worked in biomedical labs in college.
It is the researchers fault, but they’re also just doing what gets them the most funding for the least amount of work.
The problem here is they do studies on only men, and then in the paper day “it works for humans” when that is a lie. They’re lying and thats somehow acceptable.
possibly related https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2024/12/429161/microplastics-air-may-be-leading-lung-and-colon-cancers
Too bad we don't have a good idea why this might be. All the possibilities suggested in the article are just speculation. Hoping for some better data soon.
I don't know if they deliberately focused on these two people to have some balance of severity of the problem and optimism, but I found it interesting that both are in bad situations that were probably death sentences not too long ago but are expected to live in the near term. It's kind of amazing that we have effective treatments for these kind of things nowadays, although we wish they were better.