Tue Dec 3, 145 PM ET

By Karin Nordin

STOCKHOLM (Reuters Health) - The incidence of asbestos-related lung cancer seems to have leveled off in Sweden, according to a report that suggests rates of the disease elsewhere in Europe could also peak sooner than expected.

Researchers collected data on the cancer, pleural mesothelioma, from the Swedish Cancer Registry between 1961 and 2000. In Sweden the use of asbestos rapidly diminished in 1976, but due to the disease's long latency time, the peak in pleural mesothelioma cases did not occur until 1993, they report in a letter to the January 1, 2003, issue of the International Journal of Cancer. But the researchers note that this is earlier than previously expected.

"The previous estimates have been called optimistic but this shows that they are rather pessimistic," Professor Kari Hemminki at the department of biosciences at Novum, Karolinska Institute, told Reuters Health.

Some estimates of the lag-time between exposure and mortality have been around 50 years, and models have predicted that the incidence of the disease would not reach a maximum until between 2015 and 2030 in Western Europe.

It is expected that Sweden would be among the first to see numbers peak, since use of asbestos was reduced here much earlier than in other countries.

"This would be good news to other Western European countries," the researchers write in their article. According to Hemminki, it can now be expected that the leveling off in Western Europe will happen between 2003 and 2013, assuming that exposure levels have been the same as in Sweden.

During the study period there were 2,190 cases of mesothelioma in men, 2,030 of which could be related to asbestos exposure, according to the study. For women, the number of asbestos-related cases was 350.