Cigarette smoking is known to adversely affect lung cancer prognosis and treatment outcomes. Including smoking history in stage-specific survival analyses could enhance prognostic accuracy. To investigate this, a study evaluated the association between smoking status at diagnosis and overall survival (OS) in 48,531 lung cancer patients across 25 countries. Among the participants, 75% had adenocarcinoma and 21% squamous cell carcinoma.
Compared with never-smokers, both current (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR]: 1.39) and former smokers (aHR: 1.32) demonstrated significantly worse OS. Current smokers also had poorer OS than former smokers (aHR: 1.05). These associations remained consistent across disease stages, among Asians, patients with adenocarcinoma, and both sexes. Patients who were former or current smokers had OS comparable to never-smokers at the next higher TNM stage, and in…
