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Women are at much higher risk for contracting lung cancer and for women who have never smoked the rate of developing lung cancer is on the rise.

The American Association for Cancer Research has found that lung cancer tumors in non-smokers are different than tumors in smokers and they are trying to determine why.

The World Health Organization, WHO, recently classified diesel fumes as carcinogenic.

This might explain the rise along with other environmental factors.

“Not only has there been an increase in the number of women and non-smokers contracting the disease, but there has also been an increase in the number of cases diagnosed in stage 4 of the illness,” lead researcher Dr. Chrystèle Locher said in a statement.
This change — 58 percent with stage 4 in 2010 compared with 43 percent in 2000 — might reflect new classifications of different stages of the disease, the researchers said. They also found big changes in the type of cancer being diagnosed. The rate of people developing adenocarcinoma, a form of non-small cell lung cancer, jumped from 35.8 percent to 53.5 percent over the decade.