LungBlog

Many non smokers get diagnosed with lung cancer. Why? The answer may linger in your home, the air and the tip of your tongue. And for those who want to kick the habit and keep your kids from ever taking a puff, there are solutions, some of which are heating up Hollywood.

Most people associate cancer therapy and treatment with surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, care management encompasses more than just medical care, but also palliative care.

According to the American Cancer Society,  lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in American men and women today.

Getting the cure rate of a cancer up to 80 percent would be big news under any circumstances. But the news is even bigger when the disease is as lethal as lung cancer, which kills an estimated 160,000 people annually in the US alone, where about 95 percent of those diagnosed with the disease currently die of it. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the study that appears in today’s New England Journal of Medicine is that it doesn’t require any changes in the actual medical treatment—instead, a revolution in diagnostic capacity has allowed lung cancers to be identified so early in their progression that standard intervention can be far more effective.

A controversial new study offers the strongest evidence yet that screening smokers for lung cancer with computerized chest scans can save lives, much as mammograms do for women with breast cancer.

Doctors have long had doubts that early detection of tumors could improve survival, and also feared that screening would lead to too many false alarms and unnecessary biopsies. Scans are not now recommended, but many smokers have been paying for them on their own for their peace of mind.

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Researchers report that patients whose lung tumors were spotted early by CAT scans and received immediate treatment were likely to survive a disease that is almost always fatal by the time it is diagnosed using traditional chest X-rays.The findings could pave the way for more widespread use of the costly tests to screen for lung cancer and could raise hopes for millions of Americans who are at risk for the nation’s most deadly form of cancer.

EntreMed has launched a first round of human trials on lung cancer patients for a drug already in clinical tests to battle other forms of cancer.

The Rockville company is starting Phase I trials of MKC-1, its small-molecule drug to treat lung cancer — the same drug it began testing in Phase I for leukemia one month ago and in Phase II trials for advanced breast cancer 10 months ago.

Lung cancer is the number one cancer killer — more deadly than breast, prostate, cervical and colon cancers combined. Of the 173,000 people who are newly diagnosed with lung cancer each year, a staggering 95 percent will eventually die from it.

Early screening tests for other cancers — such as mammography and colonoscopy — can find tumors in their early and more treatable stages. For lung cancers, however, no proven screening test exists. But researchers think they may have found one.

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If you smoke or used to smoke you may want to take a closer look at this test.  It’s called a C.T. scan.  When former smoker Henry Chertok had one last year, doctors spotted the earliest sign of cancer in his lungs.  He then had surgery to remove the disease.

A new generation of CT scanners that can detect cancer in the lungs as small as a grain of rice - when the tumor is still highly curable - is raising hopes that screening may drastically reverse the grim outlook for lung cancer just as mammography did for breast cancer.