Women may lack lung cancer signs

A significant proportion of women with newly diagnosed lung cancer had normal lung function tests, U.S. researchers have reported.

The finding means that women who lack symptoms of lung disease should not automatically be considered free of lung cancer risk, they said in the May issue of the journal Chest.

And many more men than women who had been diagnosed with lung cancer were found to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease -- a permanent reduction of lung function considered by many doctors to be a first indication of cancer.

“These findings suggest that the susceptibility patterns among women may be different compared with men,” said Dr. Raghu Loganathan of Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx in New York, who led the study.