USA Today on Wednesday examined the "tragic truth" that lung cancer can affect individuals who never smoked. About 85% of non-smokers diagnosed with lung cancer are women, according to Jill Siegfried, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. One out of five women with lung cancer never smoked, compared with one out of 10 men with lung cancer, Siegfried said. It is unclear why most lung cancer patients who did not smoke are women, although estrogen and genetics might be factors. Joan Schiller, a lung cancer doctor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and president of Women Against Lung Cancer, said about 40% of people with lung cancer are women, but "when many people, both doctors and nondoctors, think about lung cancer, the face they see is an older, smoking man" (Rubin, USA Today, 3/8).

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