Lung cancer is rising among women who never smoked

Lung cancer made up 15.7% of cases among women in a study of 129,309 patients diagnosed from 2011 to 2016, even though none of them had ever smoked, a share that climbed to more than 50% among Asian American women. For Chinese American and Indian American women with lung cancer, 80% to 90% had never smoked.

The numbers land on a disease that the American Cancer Society says is the second most common cancer diagnosed in U.S. women and the leading cause of cancer death in women. In its 2024 estimates, the society projected about 124,990 lung cancer deaths in the United States in 2026 overall, and the American Lung Association says someone in the country is diagnosed about every two minutes while 361 people die from the disease each day.

That burden is colliding with a blind spot in care. Women who never smoked often do not see themselves as candidates for lung cancer, and they can fall outside screening criteria built around smoking history. That leaves cancers more likely to be found late, after symptoms have already been ignored or attributed to something else.

The public health response has started to shift. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now maintains a dedicated resource page on lung cancer among people who never smoked, and the Lung Cancer Research Foundation has built women-and-lung-cancer education materials around the disease as a specific patient issue. Those efforts reflect a larger change in how researchers are framing the problem: not as a niche exception, but as a real women’s health and equity concern.

The disparity is especially stark in Asian American communities, where the burden is far out of proportion to smoking exposure. More than half of Asian American women with lung cancer have never smoked, and the share rises to 80% to 90% among Chinese American and Indian American women. Researchers and advocates say those patterns are driving more study of possible causes, from environmental and genetic factors to other exposures that have not been fully captured in older tobacco-centered models.

There are signs of progress in treatment and survival, but the disease still exacts a heavy toll. The American Lung Association says the national five-year survival rate has risen 26% over the past five years to 28.4%, yet the diagnosis remains common and lethal enough to expose the limits of a prevention strategy built too narrowly around smoking history alone.