LungBlog

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – A report by a federal agency says Maine has the nation’s highest death rate from a lethal cancer linked to asbestos.

It’s called mesothelioma, and 173 Maine residents died from it during a six-year period beginning in 1999.

According to mesothelioma-lung-cancer.org, Mesothelioma is a very rare form of lung cancer that arises in the mesothelium.

People with lung cancer get worse treatment from the NHS than those in other western European countries, according to an official report today.

Too many hospitals do not offer acceptable standards of treatment to the 38,000 people a year who are diagnosed with what is one of the most lethal and hardest to treat forms of cancer, it admits.

A drug temporarily withdrawn from the Food and Drug Administration for approval in non-small cell lung cancer will still likely get the green light when it’s resubmitted, Alan Sandler, MD, told a group of medical professionals at the Practical Applications of New Agents in Oncology conference in March in San Antonio, Texas.

A new study presented today suggests that the risk of getting lung cancer from smoking has increased over time due to changes in cigarette design. 

Up to one half of current lung cancer occurrence could be attributable to cigarette design, according to David Burns and Christy Anderson of the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. Consequently, the study concludes, lung cancer rates could be reduced by up to 50 percent through more regulatory control of cigarette composition

RIDGEWOOD, N.J., April 30 — The addition of  (Erbitux) to standard chemotherapy for non-small-cell lung cancer prolonged survival and can now be regarded as a first-line treatment option, researchers said.

Among 1,125 chemotherapy-naive adult patients, those receiving chemotherapy plus cetuximab survived for a median of 11 months, compared with a median of 10 months for those receiving chemotherapy alone (hazard ratio for death 0.871; CI 0.762 to 0.996, P=0.044), Robert Pirker, M.D., of the Medical University of Vienna, and colleagues reported in the May 2 issue of The Lancet.

IT is the most deadly cancer in the UK – and your chance of surviving it could be wrecked by GEOGRAPHY.

Shocking differences in lung cancer care across the country are exposed in a damning report released yesterday.

The National Lung Cancer Audit reveals half of all patients with the disease receive NO treatment aimed at halting its spread.

The search for the cause of an inherited form of a rare, aggressive childhood lung cancer has uncovered important information about how the cancer develops and potentially sheds light on the development of other cancers.

The finding by researchers at the School of Medicine, Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the International Pleuropulmonary Blastoma Registry at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota and other collaborating institutions adds the final link to the chain connecting the gene DICER1 to cancer development — something that had been suspected but until now not definitively demonstrated.

We are smokers.

I started smoking about two decades after the surgeon general issued a warning that the nicotine and tar in cigarettes was linked to lung cancer and Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 that required every pack of cigarettes to carry a warning label on its side: “Cigarettes may be hazardous to your health.”

Lung cancer can be beaten but it’s proving difficult, an assessment of the province’s treatment system revealed yesterday.

The 2009 Cancer System Quality Index shows that survival rates for lung cancer remain steady at 17% compared to a decade ago but the chances of living five years after being diagnosed with prostate, breast or colorectal cancer have all increased substantially.

Lung Cancer research at UCSF is poised to leap forward, thanks to a big bank. No, not some teetering financial institution down the street. What UCSF has is an invaluable tissue bank.

When it comes to lung tumors, the quantity and quality of UCSF’s chilly-vault holdings are hard to beat. They’re a treasure trove that will help researchers determine how cancer survival odds and responses to treatments are affected by specific genetic abnormalities within tumors – and even by normally inherited variations in genes.