No smoking link to 25% of lung cancers

AT LEAST a quarter of all lung cancer may be nothing but ‘bad luck’ – and totally unrelated to smoking – according to a top British expert.

Non-smokers are just as likely as smokers to get a common type of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma, said surgeon Eric Lim.

This type, which develops from mucus-making cells in the linings of the airways, accounts for between a quarter and a half of the 40,000 lung cancer cases diagnosed in Britain every year.

Mr Lim looked at more than 2,000 cases where patients had undergone ‘resections’ of the lung to remove tumours at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London between 2008 and 2014.

He found that adenocarcinoma had occurred ‘in the same proportion in smokers and non-smokers’.

‘In other words, people who never smoked are no less likely to be diagnosed with adenocarcinoma than smokers,’ he said, adding: ‘It could just be down to bad luck.’

By contrast smokers were much more likely to be diag- nosed with another common form of lung cancer, called squamous non-small cell lung cancer, he explained.

However Mr Lim, the cancer research expert at the NHS trust which runs the two hospitals, stressed that the idea that adenocarcinoma is not caused by smoking was only a theory at the moment.

He added: ‘We are just putting it out there that there is a possibility that one type of lung cancer actually happens whether you are a smoker or not.’ But he went on to say: ‘We need to stop seeing lung cancer as a purely smokers’ disease.’