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Ernst L. Wynder, Dietrich Hoffmann, Re: Cigarette Smoking and the Histopathology of Lung Cancer, JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Volume 90, Issue 19, 7 October 1998, Pages 1486–1487, https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/90.19.1486
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In recent communications appearing in this Journal, Thun et al. (1) as well as Gazdar and Minna (2) emphasize that the epidemiology of lung cancer continues to take unexpected courses that deserve our attention for academic and public health reasons. Both communications deal with the observations over recent years of a relative increase in adenocarcinoma and a relative decrease in squamous cell cancer of the lung in both men and women. Variations in the histology of lung cancer have also been evident in our studies for many years (3ߝ5). In the 1950s, the occurrence of squamous cell cancer predominated over adenocarcinoma in cigarettesmoking men at a ratio of 17 to 1. At that time, most of the women with adenocarcinoma of the lung were nonsmokers and, for that matter, very few women in the general population were long-term cigarette smokers (3); however, among nonsmokers of both sexes, adenocarcinoma was more common than squamous cell cancer. In recent years, the occurrence of adenocarcinomas in smokers has outranked that of squamous cell carcinomas, to give a ratio ranging from 0.85 to 1.5 in men and from 2.05 to 7.0 in women, depending on the calendar year of onset of cigarette smoking (5)
