Lung cancer is a common primary malignancy in survivors of adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancers, according to study findings prompting a recommendation for wider provision of smoking cessation advice.

“Lung cancer accounted for a substantial proportion of the excess number of cancers observed after all AYA cancers investigated in detail,” Dr Michael M. Hawkins from the Centre for Childhood Cancer Survivor Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, said by email.

Previous studies have estimated that survivors of AYA cancer have a rate of subsequent primary neoplasms as much as three times higher than that expected for the general population.

Dr Hawkins’s team used data from more than 200,000 people diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 39 from the UK’s Teenage and Young Adult Cancer Survivor Study (TYACSS) to calculate the risks of all and specific subsequent primary neoplasms after each type of AYA cancer.