From today’s Guardian:
It took decades to establish that smoking causes lung cancer. Heavy smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by a factor of about 11, the largest risk ratio for any common risk factor for any disease. But that doesn’t make it peculiar that there should be any non-smokers with lung cancer.
As with my discussion of the horrified accounts of obesity someday overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer, the main cause is a change in the baseline level of smoking. As fewer people smoke, and as non-smokers stubbornly continue to age and die, the proportional mortality of non-smokers will inevitably increase.
It is perfectly reasonable to say we should consider diverting public-health resources from tobacco toward other causes of disease, as the fraction of disease caused by smoking declines. And it’s particularly of concern for physicians, who tend toward essentialism in their view of risk factors — “lung cancer is a smoker’s disease” — to the neglect of base rates. But the Guardian article frames the lung cancer deaths in non-smokers as a worrying “rise”:
They blame the rise on car fumes, secondhand smoke and indoor air pollution, and have urged people to stop using wood-burning stoves because the soot they generate increases risk… About 6,000 non-smoking Britons a year now die of the disease, more than lose their lives to ovarian or cervical cancer or leukaemia, according to research published on Friday in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
While the scientific article they are reporting on never explicitly says that lung cancer incidence in non-smokers [LCINS] is increasing, certainly some fault for the confusion may be found there:
the absolute numbers and rates of lung cancers in never-smokers are increasing, and this does not appear to be confounded by passive smoking or misreported smoking status.
This sounds like a serious matter. Except, the source they cite a) doesn’t provide much evidence of this and b) is itself 7 years old, and only refers to evidence that dates back well over a decade. It cites one study that found an increase in LCINS in Swedish males in the 1970s and 1980s, a much larger study that found no change over time in LCINS in the US between 1959 and 2004, and a French study that found rates increasing in women and decreasing in men, concluding finally
An increase in LCINS incidence could be real, or the result of the decrease in the proportion of ever smokers in some strata of the general population, and/or ageing within these categories.
What proportion of lung cancers should we expect to be found in non-smokers? Taking the 11:1 risk ratio, and 15% smoking rate in the UK population, we should actually expect about 85/(15×11)≈52% of lung cancer to occur in non-smokers. Why is it only 1/6, then? The effect of smoking on lu estimated that lung cancer develops after about 30 years of smoking. If we look back at the 35% smoking incidence of the mid 1980s, we would get an estimate of about 65/(35×11)≈17%.
Common Infirmities 