For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.

Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer among women in the United States,

surpassing the mortality numbers of breast and ovarian cancer combined.

And surprisingly, younger women who have never smoked are increasingly being diagnosed with the disease.

Here to explain what could be driving this trend and why early screening can make all the difference

is Jonathan Vienna, a thoracic surgeon at New York Presbyterian and Wyle Cornell.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So our viewers and listeners might be surprised to hear

that lung cancer and women now tops breast cancer, ovarian cancer combined. Can you tell us more

about what's going on there? Yeah, definitely. So in general, lung cancer is the number one

cancer affecting people in the United States, both men and women.

If you look at the American Cancer Society, around 226,000 new cases of lung cancer are projected to be diagnosed in 2025.

Of those, about 50% are cancer-related deaths, meaning 120,000 people die every year from lung

cancer.

Now, the good news is that the incidence has actually been decreasing in the last few years.

If you look at the American Cancer Society's statistics, in the last 10 years, the incidence

of lung cancer has decreased in men around 3% per year,

and it's about half of that in women, meaning it's decreasing 1.5% per year.

So one of the reasons that they think that this might be happening is that there was an uptick

in smoking in women around the 60s and 70s, And that's why we're seeing a slight decrease in the incidence in men,

but not so much in the women.

...