WOMEN are twice as likely as men to develop lung cancer from smoking, scientists have found.

New research has suggested that gender can determine whether a smoker contracts the disease — which kills 80 per cent of sufferers within a year of diagnosis.

A woman smoker’s risk of lung cancer is just over double that of a man, once age and cigarette consumption are taken into account, according to preliminary results from Cornell University, New York.

The findings are alarming because, in Britain, woman are giving up smoking at a much slower rate than men, and teenage girls are more likely to start than boys. Lung cancer recently overtook breast cancer as the most common cause of cancer death among women.

The results, presented at the Radiological Society of North America conference in Chicago yesterday, come from trials of a technique known as computed tomography (CT), led by Claudia Henschke, Professor of Radiology at Cornell. Almost 3,000 current or former smokers aged over 40 took part over ten years.

“We found that women had twice the risk of developing lung cancer as men, independent of how much they smoked, their age or the size and texture of nodules found in their lungs,” she said. “These are preliminary findings and we need more data, but they do suggest that being a female puts you at higher risk of lung cancer.”

One of the most plausible explanations is that women tend to smoke low-tar cigarettes, which are inhaled more deeply. This has been linked to adenocarcinoma, a particularly dangerous lung cancer.

Professor Stephen Spiro, of the British Lung Foundation, said: “We don’t know whether this is a blip or the beginning of a trend, but if it’s confirmed, it’s extremely worrying.”

Other experts, however, were sceptical of the figures, which are based on 77 cases. Sir Richard Peto, of Cancer Research UK’s Clinical Trials Service Unit in Oxford, said: “This is a very small study and its conclusions may well be wrong. It’s simply not true that men and women who smoke have very different lung cancer rates.

“Women have been smoking almost as much as men for some time in Britain and North America, but while the national death rates from lung cancer in early middle age are now nearly as high among women as among men, they are not higher.”

In 2001, 20,350 men and 13,040 women died of lung cancer. It is the second most common male cancer (after prostate) and the third most common female cancer (after breast and bowel), and the biggest killer of both sexes.

Some 28 per cent of adult men and 26 per cent of adult women now smoke, but the recent decline has been much steeper for men than for women: in 1978, 45 per cent of men smoked, compared with 37 per cent of women.

Times Recommends

• Everyone will get vaccine against swine flu
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes