![]() “When I began treating lung cancer in the early 1980s, I saw four men for every woman. Yet while it has fallen by 44% in men in that time, it has risen by 69% in women because women began giving up smoking years later. Since the late 1970s, the rate of lung cancer diagnosis has fallen by 14%. The media’s focus on breast, cervical and prostate cancer obscures the fact that lung cancer is Britain’s biggest cancer killer, claiming about 35,600 lives a year more than from breast, prostate, liver and bladder cancer combined. It’s the tune that’s always playing in my head.” It’s the first thing I think about in the morning, the last thing I think about at night and the thing I think about when I wake up in the night. “Like all people in my situation, you think: why? I ask that question every single day. Abbott loathes the stigma that non-smokers face when they get “the smoker’s disease” every time she tells someone about her diagnosis, she feels obliged to add: “I’ve never smoked.” In addition, the absolute numbers and rates of LCINs are going up. The decline of cigarette consumption over the past 15 years means that the proportion of people with the disease who are LCINs is growing. While about 10% of men in Britain diagnosed with lung cancer are non-smokers, the percentage of women is higher: 15-20%. ![]() That is more than the number of people who die of cervical cancer (900), lymphoma (5,200), leukaemia (4,500) and ovarian cancer (4,200): “If considered as a separate entity, LCIN is the eighth most common cause of cancer-related death in the UK, and the seventh most prevalent cancer in the world,” he writes. In an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Prof Mick Peake – the clinical director of the centre for cancer outcomes at University College London hospital (UCLH) – estimates that nearly 6,000 people who have never smoked die of lung cancer every year. Their numbers are on the rise, though experts cannot fully explain why. Doctors who specialise in the condition are now seeing so many people who have never smoked that they have coined an acronym: LCINs – lung cancer in never smokers. But Abbott is among the growing number of women who have never smoked but are nevertheless being diagnosed with the disease while they are still “young” in medical terms – that is, under 55. Lung cancer is indelibly associated in the public mind with cigarettes, and with good reason: about 86% of those who get it are smokers or ex-smokers. “I had never smoked, because cigarettes made me feel sick. I locked myself in the bathroom, and cried and cried.” Her diagnosis left her reeling. That was my first thought: this can’t be happening. The doctor told her that she had lung cancer, and that it was not curable. “When they called me into a side office and introduced me to a lung nurse, I knew it wasn’t going to be good,” says Abbott, a former BBC producer turned trainee psychoanalyst. ![]() After a CT scan, staff told Abbott there were three possibilities: cancer, an infection or a blood clot. The x-ray there revealed fluid on her right lung.
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