Fatal primary cancer of the lung in a teen-age smoker

✍ Scribed by Kenneth C. Sawyer; Robert B. Sawyer; Alexis E. Lubchenco; Douglas A. McKinnon; Kenneth A. Hill

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1967
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 812 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0008-543X
• DOI: 10.1002/1097-0142(1967)20:3<451::aid-cncr2820200313>3.0.co;2-h

✦ Synopsis

Fatal primary carcinoma of the lung in a 16-year-old boy who smoked cigarettes is described. The disease progressed rapidly even after a lobectomy, without evidence of lymphatic involvement, was performed. A plea is made for even broader education of physicians and laymen in the potential harmful effects of cigarette smoking.

ARCINOMA OF THE LUNG IN CHILDREN IS EX-

C tremely rare. Cayley, Caez and Mersheimer,2 in an exhaustive review of the literature in 1951, found only 15 cases among children 14 years of age or younger. Ochsnerg and his associates studied 4,307 cases of bronchogenic carcinoma. They found that, whereas 85y0 of the patients were between ages 40 and 70, only 0.16Y0 of the cases occurred in the first decade and 0.7Y0 in the second decade.

Matz,5 who gathered 1,814 cases from the literature, found only 5 patients younger than 20, the youngest being 13. Dargeon3 observed that, between 1930 and 1935 in the Memorial Hospital of New York City, only 218 cases of cancer were diagnosed in children and none of these was primary cancer of the lung.

T h e youngest patient in the 77 cases reported by Vinson, Moersch and KirklinlO was 29 years old. I n 1946 Dick and Miller4 reviewed the literature and found, besides their own, onIy 7 authentic cases of primary carcinoma of the lung in children.

Cardellel and his associates found one teenage death from cancer of the lung, in a patient 11 years old, in a series of 10,000 autopsies at the Municipal Hospital for Children in Havana. Schwyterg called attention to the relationship between malformation and tumor of the lung. Two of his 8 cases were children; one had carcinoma of the lung superimposed on congenital atelectasis and the other had a combination of carcinoma and congenital lung cysts.

Among adults, an appalling increase in car-