A recent study has found that women seem to survive longer than men with the asbestos-linked cancer mesothelioma.

The study, published in the June 11 issue of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery studied information collected for the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, a collection of patient data maintained by the National Cancer Institute. The data ranged from 1979 through 2009.

According to an analysis of the SEER data, women’s five-year survival rate was as high as 13.4 percent, while males only had a 4.5 percent survival rate at the same benchmark. The study was very significant, since it had just a large data set. Large data sets increase the statistical power of a study, making it less likely that the results are due to coincidence. Such studies are said to have greater statistical power.

The research has serious clinical implications. Mesothelioma resists most treatment, and is among the deadliest cancers. Some patients can benefit substantially from treatment, experiencing a greatly extended life span. It is important to identify the factors that make a person more likely to benefit from invasive treatments like radiation and chemotherapy.

Though males suffer mesothelioma at a higher rate, a significant number of women do get the disease. The disease is more prevalent in males, since men make up a greater portion of the industrial workforce.

But at an increasing rate of women entered the work force, particularly during the World Wars. Unfortunately, this was still during the era when asbestos was a widespread building material due to its useful properties. Because of this, even a housewife could find herself exposed to a dangerous level of asbestos through a number of routes. Cleaning a husband’s asbestos-dusted work clothes or even living near an asbestos manufacturing facility could result in a sufficient exposure to develop mesothelioma.

Asbestos lung cancer lawsuits have been filed by patients who developed mesothelioma. These asbestos lawsuits typically allege that various companies failed to protect workers from asbestos exposure, resulting in them developing various health complications including mesothelioma. Mesothelioma is strongly linked to asbestos exposures.

Some asbestos lawsuits take the form of class action lawsuits. Class action lawsuits are a sort of group lawsuit, where a number of plaintiffs allege that they have suffered similar harm at the hands of the same defendant. Class action lawsuits are designed to help streamline the legal process by combining tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual lawsuits into a single class action lawsuit. This saves the legal system resources by only having to try a single case.