Women who cook on a daily basis without using a kitchen exhaust fan are nearly 1.8 times more likely to suffer from lung adenocarcinoma, a form of small-cell lung cancer, than those who do not cook, a study by the Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer in Taiwan (GELAC) released yesterday showed.
The GELAC research team that conducted the study was comprised of representatives from the National Health Research Institutes (NHRI), Academia Sinica, National Taiwan University and several hospitals. They made public their findings at a two-day health forum in Taipei yesterday.
NHRI Institute of Population Sciences director Hsiung Chao (熊昭), one of the members of the team, said that nearly 90 percent of female patients with lung adenocarcinoma have never smoked, yet lung cancer has been the leading cause of cancer deaths among Taiwanese women for the past decade.
“The research team monitored the health conditions of 1,200 female lung adenocarcinoma patients and 1,200 healthy women since 2002 and found four major risk factors for lung cancer: tuberculosis, family medical history, second-hand smoke, and cooking fumes,” Hsiung said.
Hsiung said that women who have contracted tuberculosis are 2.9 times more susceptible to lung cancer, while those who have a family history of lung cancer or who have been exposed to secondhand smoke are 2.6 times and 1.5 times more likely respectively to contract the disease.
“In addition, women who have cooked three meals a day for 48 years are 1.78 times more likely to get lung cancer, but they could lower that risk by 43 percent by always having a kitchen range hood on while cooking,” Hsiung said.
National Taiwan University principal Yan Pan-chyr (楊泮池), a lung cancer expert, said that lung cancer is a multifactorial disease and that more than half of patients who develop it do not experience any symptoms in the early stages of the disease.
“Nearly 75 percent of patients with lung cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage and less than 20 percent of them live more than five years past their diagnosis,” Yang said.
Yang said that people aged 45 and older who are at high risk of developing lung cancer are advised to undergo routine low-dose computed tomography screening, which can detect lung nodules as small as 0.2cm to 0.3cm in diameter.
“Patients who have tumors that are less than 1cm wide when diagnosed typically have a 97 percent five-year survival rate, while that survival rate drops to approximately 80 percent for those with tumors ranging between 1cm and 2cm,” Yang said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS