Cancer Resources > Cancer News > 2004 > October

Lung cancer deaths soar in France, fall in UK

Richard Woodman

Last Updated: 2004-10-11 9:22:28 -0400 (Reuters Health)

LONDON (Agence de Presse Medicale for Reuters Health) - Lung cancer deaths in young middle age are rising sharply in France but falling in the UK, where anti-smoking policies were introduced earlier, a leading epidemiologist told a cancer conference at the weekend.

Professor Sir Richard Peto, of the Clinical Trials Service Unit in Oxford, said the lung cancer death rate in British men ages 35 to 44 had dropped from 16 per 100,000 to 4 per 100,000 between 1950 and 2000.

"But France is the mirror image, and rates have quadrupled from 4 to 16," he told the Entente Cordiale cancer summit in London.

Professor Peto said the lung cancer death rate in French women in this age group had increased from about 2 to 5 over the same period -- overtaking the UK rate of less than 4.

He said the UK had introduced tobacco controls earlier than countries such as France, Spain, Portugal and Greece, where lung cancer deaths are continuing to rise steeply.

Different countries in Europe had very much the same cancer mortality once the effects of tobacco were taken out of the equation, he said. "Tobacco just dominates everything and it's inappropriate the extent to which that's undervalued in the cancer research strategy."

Peto said the UK also had the biggest drop in deaths from breast cancer in the world -- admittedly from a very high level -- probably because tamoxifen was widely adopted in the UK in the 1980s before other countries.

The UK breast cancer death rate had dropped from over 70 per 100,000 women ages 35 to 69 in 1990 to just over 50 by 2000, whereas in France the rate had dropped only from 50 to 45 over the same period.

A 1.1 million pound annual grant to fund 15 international research fellowships was announced at the conference by UK Health Secretary John Reid and Francois d'Aubert, French Ministre delegue a la Recherche.

The initiative will enable young researchers from the U.K, France, the United States and Canada to spend time in laboratories outside their home country and explore new ways of fighting cancer.

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