Women Much More Likely to Survive Mesothelioma than Men
A new study of more than 14,000 American mesothelioma patients finds that women are three times more likely to survive mesothelioma than men are. Researchers from the North Shore/Long Island Jewish Health System-Hofstra School of Medicine and Mount Sinai Health System in New York studied all pathologically confirmed mesothelioma cases in the national Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database between 1973 and 2009. Patients were analyzed by age, year of diagnosis, race, stage, treatments, gender and other factors. The team then used the data to assess the association between the various prognostic factors and survival. Of the 14,228 malignant pleural mesothelioma cases analyzed, 22% occurred in women. These women tended to be diagnosed at around the same cancer stage…