Lung Cancer Lurks in Worsening Female Health Data

By Allison Stevens

American women take note: Mortality rates from breast cancer and heart disease have dropped, but women are now more likely to experience poor mental health, develop diabetes, get chlamydia and commit suicide than their recent predecessors, according to a recent study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

More alarming still: the life expectancy for low-income, uneducated white women has dropped by five years over the last quarter century, from 78 years in 1990 to 73 in 2008, according to a 2013 study in Health Affairs.

“We have a major problem going on, and we don’t know why this is happening,” Steven Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Society and Health, told a women’s health conference in April in Washington, D.C.

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