Cancer Deaths Found in More Men Than Women

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association and supported by the National Institutes of Health found that the highest male-to-female mortality rate ratios for cancers like lip, where 5.5 men died for each female patient, and esophageal, where four men died for each female patient. For lung cancer, which is the leading cause of cancer deaths for both men and women, the research found 2.3 male deaths for each female death.

Although restrictive to the male species, Prostate cancer is no different, as far as mortality goes.

Prostate cancer is quickly becoming one of the more fatal cancers. An expert at the Harvard School of Public Health, Stacey Kenfield discovered this fact after a 22-year-old database on more than 5,300 men who were diagnosed with prostate cancer - focused on those who were smokers at the time of diagnosis were more likely to die. Kenfield told the United States Department of Health and Human Services that those men who had quit smoking 10 years before diagnosis were no more likely to die than were men who had never smoked.

The study looked at a database of 36 different types of cancer from 1977 to 2006.

If one stops smoking, they have a reduced risk of prostate cancer recurrence and improved prostate cancer survival, Kenfield told HHS. Likewise, the main reason for the difference is that men are more at risk of developing cancer to begin with, according to Michael Cook, an investigator in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the NCI and the study's lead investigator.

The average lifetime chance that a man will develop lung cancer is about 1 in 13, compared to 1 in 16 for a woman, according to the American Cancer Society. American men are more likely than women to have advanced disease by the time their cancer is diagnosed, Cook told Reuters.

CNN reports:

Leukemia and cancers of the colon and rectum, pancreas, and liver killed about one and a half to two times as many men as women in the U.S. over a 30-year period. In addition, lung cancer killed nearly two and a half times as many men during that time. The American Cancer Society estimates that men have about a 1 in 2 chance of developing cancer at some point in their lives, compared with women, who have a 1 in 3 chance.