With lung cancer, quitters do better than smokers

Younger people with advanced lung cancer who quit smoking more than a year before their diagnosis survive longer than those who continued smoking, according to a US study.

However, quitters who were older or who had earlier stages of lung cancer did not have an advantage, said the researchers, whose findings appeared in the journal Cancer.

It's known that people who never smoked are more likely to survive the disease, but whether former smokers do better than current ones has been less clear.

The findings do suggest there is some benefit to quitting smoking, said Amy Ferketich of Ohio State University College of Public Health in Columbus, who worked on the study.

Her group used medical records from 4,200 lung cancer patients treated at eight cancer centers around the country.

Patients who never smoked were more likely to survive the less advanced cancers - stage 1, 2 or 3 - than were former or current smokers, the researchers found.

Among smokers with stage 1 or 2 lung cancer, for instance, 72 per cent survived at least two years, compared to 93 per cent of the never-smokers and 76 per cent of people who'd kicked the habit a year or more before diagnosis.

Only 15 per cent of smokers with stage 4 disease survived two years, while 40 per cent of never-smokers and 20 per cent of former smokers did.

After adjusting the numbers for factors such as age, race and radiation treatment, the researchers determined that quitters were just as likely to die from the early-stage cancers as were current smokers.

But for advanced cancers, people under 85 who had stopped smoking more than a year before their diagnosis survived longer than smokers. Forty-five-year-old former smokers, for instance, were 30 per cent less likely to die from stage 4 lung cancer within two years than were current smokers.

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