AdLC Incidence Grows 15 Times Faster in Southern Than Northern Taiwan

 AdLC Incidence Grows 15 Times Faster in Southern Than Northern Taiwan

Source: UDN

August 22, 2019

National Taiwan University, National Chung Hsing University, National Yang Ming University, the National Health Research Institutes, and the Taiwan Cancer Registry jointly conducted a study on lung cancer (LC). After reviewing over 370,000 patients with LC, they found that from 1995 to 2015, the annual incidence of adenocarcinoma lung cancer (AdLC) in Taiwan had continuously increased, with AdLC incidence in males and females climbing from 9.06 to 23.25 and 7.05 to 24.22 per 100,000 population, respectively.

The researchers believed that smoking was not the only factor causing lung cancer as 53% of the LC patients studied had never smoked. They, therefore, suspected that the increasing AdLC incidence was a result of air pollution.

According to the study, as the air quality in northern Taiwan, including Taipei City, New Taipei City, Keelung, and Taoyuan, has been improving with more factories moving overseas and a well-established mass transit system, while the air quality in the Kaohsiung-Pingtung area has been deteriorating year after year owing to the development of the petrochemical industry, the annual growth rate of AdLC incidence in the Kaohsiung-Pingtung area is 15 times higher than that in northern Taiwan.

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