November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month so I'm doing my part to help spread the word about causes, symptoms or warning signs, treatments, prevention, and research.
Lung Cancer Facts
Lung cancer kills more people every year than breast, prostate, colon, and pancreatic cancer combined. In fact one in every three cancer deaths is due to lung cancer. Lung cancer doesn't discriminate between ethnic groups and there is no particular ethnic group that is more affected by lung cancer than another.
Lung cancer kills more than three times as many men as prostate cancer, and almost two times as many women as breast cancer. Lung cancer kills an average of 437 people every day.
Surprisingly, over 60% of new cases are never smokers or smokers who quit decades before they are diagnosed.
Who is at Risk for Lung Cancer
Nearly 87% of all lung cancer diagnoses are caused by smoking. The longer a person smokes and how many tobacco products they smoke per day increases the right of developing lung cancer. As we've seen above, smokers who quit are still at risk for developing lung cancer.
Exposure to radon and asbestos can also lead to development of lung cancer. Even scarring from certain types of pneumonia can leave lungs susceptible to development of cancer cells.
Even a generally healthy person - one who has never smoked, or been exposed to radon or asbestos, or has had pneumonia - can get lung cancer. So far there is no sure-fire way of preventing it or predicting who will get it.
Symptoms or Signs of Lung Cancer
The kinds and severity of symptoms varies depending on the type, location, and size of the particular cancer tumor. There are many cases where patients haven't experienced any symptoms at all until the later stages of the cancer.
When symptoms appear they can include, but are not limited to:
Treatment for Lung Cancer
The type of treatment decided upon depends on the type of lung cancer (non-small cell lung cancer or small cell lung cancer) and the stage of the disease. Age, physiological condition, or other illnesses and mitigating health factors also play a role in determining the type and extent of treatment.
Treatments can include:
Surgery - Surgery to remove the tumor is usually used in conjunction with chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
Chemotherapy - Chemotherapy involves the systemic use of certain drugs to kill the dividing cancer cells. The goal of chemotherapy before surgery is to shrink the tumor down to a removable size. After surgery, chemotherapy is used to kill any cancer cells that may not have been visible on scans prior to surgery.
Radiation Therapy - Radiation therapy is used for several things: to shrink the tumor, or kill the cancer cells; to relieve pain and to prevent cancer from spreading to the brain.
Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) - A special chemical is injected into the bloodstream and is absorbed by cancer cells. Then a laser is used to activate the chemical to kill the cancer cells. A relatively new therapy, PDT is only used for relief of symptoms in non-small cell lung cancer and is also used to treat small tumors.
Ablation Therapies - Radiofrequencies and cryoablation are applied directly to the tumor
New Treatments
As there is currently no cure for lung cancer, many of the treatments are meant to primarily slow the spread of the disease. As with other cancers, there is always a chance that cancer will return even after a period of remission.
Research continues, however, into causes, therapies, and possible cures. Researchers are looking for ways to target therapies so healthy normal cells are not destroyed along with the cancer cells, which can happen with traditional chemotherapy. Specifically, targeting works directly on learning how cancer cells multiply and spread and developing therapies that block and/or reverse that process.
In the last five years, three new drugs were approved for use, including Alimta which was approved in September 2008 to work with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin as the "first line" treatment for locally advanced and metastatic non-small cell lung cancer that is not squamous cell carcinoma. Three other medications are in the clinical trial stage. Zactima was submitted for FDA approval in June 2009. It is meant to be used in together with chemotherapy for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
One drug (Hycamtin) was approved in October 2007 in a pill form to treat relapsed small cell lung cancer patients. Up until this approval, Hycamtin had only been available in an injectable form.
Another drug, Amrubicin, is in the clinical trial stage, but was granted fast-track designation in September 2008. This drug is being tested to treat small cell lung cancer following first-line cancer treatment.
Hopefully, the next few years will see successful clinical trials for these medications, and these drugs made available to the general public.
Sources: www.lungcanceralliance.org