DETROIT - Gender is the most significant factor impacting overall survival from lung cancer according to a study presented by researchers at Henry Ford Hospital and four other centers.
"Our study corroborates the fact that gender plays an important role as a prognostic factor in people diagnosed with lung cancer," said Benjamin Movsas, M.D., lead author of the study and chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Henry Ford Hospital.
The results of the study showed that males diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer had a 1.23 times higher mortality rate than females but that race and marital status did not significantly affect the patients' outcomes.
"This underscores the importance of studying this disease entity in light of the fact that women diagnosed with lung cancer tend to have a better outcome in terms of survival."
In 2008 approximately 215,020 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 161,840 people will die from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas and Emory University in Atlanta studied 1,365 lung cancer patients to determine the impact of sociodemographic factors such as gender, race and/or marital status on overall survival.
The study was recently presented at the 2008 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology and was part of a national radiation therapy oncology group analysis.
