They presented their findings Tuesday at a meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians, held in Chicago, Illinois.
Lung cancer remains the number one cancer killer of both men and women in the United States.
According to the American Cancer Society, over 90,000 men and 68,000 women die from lung cancer each year. Each of the study participants had decades-long histories of smoking. Buckshee and colleagues report that, after adjusting for other risk factors, female smokers had a 2.3 times higher risk of developing lung cancer than males. These findings suggest that women are more vulnerable than men to the carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. But whereas lung cancer mortality rates have been falling in men since 1990, rates among women have been rising.