Lung cancer is one of the most lethal diseases in the United States and in the world. Lung cancer mostly occurs in older people. More than 70 percent of lung cancer cases are detected in people aged 65 and older.
Identification
The major symptoms of lung cancer include wheezing, coughing up blood, persistent cough that does not go away, chest pain and shortness of breath. These symptoms are caused by the presence of the tumor in the lung putting pressure on the chest and other organs in the chest. Patients with lung cancer also experience weight loss, hypercalcemia, hyponatremia and fatigue. Patients with advanced lung cancer also often develop pneumonia or have difficulty in swallowing and pains in the bones (due to metastatic cancer in the bones).
Types
If you have some of these above symptoms, you should contact your doctor. Your doctor will examine your medical history and evaluate the risk factors for lung cancer such as smoking or exposure to asbestos. To confirm whether you have lung cancer, either chest X-ray or CT scan will be ordered.
The chest X-ray provides back, front and side views of the chest. Based on chest X-rays, your doctor can point out areas that may be cancerous.
A CT scan or CAT scan is often ordered when the X-ray comes back negative or your doctor is not able to identify areas that maybe cancerous. CAT stands for computerized axial tomography. CT scan is basically a 3D X-ray at high resolution and allows highly detailed visualization of the organs inside your body.
Other imaging techniques that maybe used to detect lung cancer or metastatic tumors of lung cancer are low-dose helical CT scan, PET scan, MRI, brain scan and bone scan.
Significance
If either the X-ray or CT scan comes back positive, a biopsy of the tumor is performed to confirm that the tumor in the chest is indeed cancerous. The most common biopsy method used for lung cancer is bronchoscopy. During bronchoscopy, a tube is inserted into into the lung through the mouth. Alternatively, a trained radiologist can insert a needle into the lung based on the information provided by the CT scan. If the tumor is too small and difficult to get to either by endoscopy or needle, a surgery will be performed.
If the biopsy confirms that the tumor is malignant, further surgeries maybe performed to assess how far the cancer has spread to the neighboring organs.
Considerations
Oncologists use staging to evaluate the severity of the disease and the prognosis for the patient and to determine the best treatment option. Stages are defined according to tumor size and penetration, the number of affected lymph nodes and the presence of metastatic tumors. Patients with stage I lung cancer have a 50 percent chance of surviving past 5 years after the diagnosis. The survival rate declines rapidly for stages II, III, and IV. For instance, the 5-year survival rate for stage IV is merely 2 percent.
Expert Insight
The treatment options for lung cancer include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. For non small cell lung carcinomas (NSCLC), surgery is still effective; however, with small cell lung carcinomas (SCLC), surgery has been shown to have no effects on survival.
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