[A case-control study of female lung cancer at XuHui district in Shanghai]

All the 57 female lung cancer patients in Xu-Hui District, Shanghai discovered during 1985 were used as subjects of this study, each was matched with 2 of her near neighbours of same sex and within 5 years of age difference. Smoking, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary tuberculosis and family history of tumour were found to be related with lung cancer in single variable analysis. Upon stratification, smoking and pulmonary tuberculosis were still found related to lung cancer and considered as risk factors with OR and its 95% confidence interval 6.996, 3.23-15.14 and 4.82, 1.37-19.97 respectively. But chronic bronchitis failed to relate with lung cancer and was considered as a confounding factor. Of all the female lung cancer cases only 49.1% and 19.3% were smokers and TB patients respectively, hence smoking and TB could be responsible only for a small portion. In cancer cytology, squamous-cell carcinoma appeared to show association with smoking while adenocarcinoma did not. Among female lung cancer cases the proportion of adenocarcinoma exceeded that of squamous-cell carcinoma, and appeared unrelated with smoking. More family members of the lung cancer cases seem to have had malignant histories, suggesting that a hereditary factor of cancer susceptibility might be involved.