Lung Cancer in Never Smokers

Lung cancer in never smokers (LCINS) has lately been recognized as a unique disease based on rapidly gained knowledge from genomic changes to treatment responses. The focus of this article is on current knowledge and challenges with regard to LCINS expanded from recent reviews highlighting five areas: (1) distribution of LCINS by temporal trends, geographic regions, and populations; (2) three well-recognized environmental risk factors; (3) other plausible environmental risk factors; (4) prior chronic lung diseases and infectious diseases as risk factors; and (5) lifestyles as risk or protective factors. This article will also bring attention to recently published literature in two pioneering areas: (1) histological characteristics, clinical features with emerging new effective therapies, and social and psychological stigma; and (2) searching for susceptibility genes using integrated genomic approaches.