LungBlog

The blame that society puts on lung cancer patients could seriously impede attention and research funding on the disease, a local expert says.

“It gets 3 per cent of the total research funding for all cancers, and yet it is the No. 1 killer,” says Dr. James Gowing, a Flamborough doctor and cochair of the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada (CACC).

Once again I hear the excitement in the headlines – cancer death rates are dropping.

But for me the news feels bittersweet. Reading through the report elicited feelings reminiscent of those I felt when I once attended a baby shower and a funeral on the same day.

First the expectant news – and it is exciting. Cancer death rates in the U.S. dropped 2% for men during the period from 2001 to 2006, and 1.5% for women from 2002 to 2006. This represents a decline in the death rate from the 4 major cancers in both men and women, except…

The somber news. Lung cancer deaths in women continue to increase, though they appear to be stabilizing.

Just how bad is lung cancer prognosis? Is lung cancer life expectancy always poor? Lung cancer remains the foremost cause of cancer death in the world and has beaten heart disease to first place as a smoking-related killer disease. Read on to learn what factors influence lung cancer prognosis, why lung cancer life expectancy is poor and if lung cancer survival rate can be improved.

Lung Cancer Prognosis – What Factors Determine Lung Cancer Survival Rate

The first thing to know about lung cancer is that there are two types – the more common non-small cell lung cancer and the more deadly small cell or oat cell lung cancer. The factors determining lung cancer prognosis are:

More and more often, I come across cases of nonsmokers who develop lung cancer. My attention is always drawn to news of this nature because my husband passed away at the age of 51 from brain and lung cancer. He never smoked a day in his life.

The complacency non-smokers have shared over the years is no longer a viable option. Smokers and non-smokers alike are vulnerable to a disease which is largely incurable. Among patients with lung cancer, only about 14% live five years after their diagnosis.

In the face of a disease that seems to have neither rhyme nor reason, what can we do to protect ourselves? First, assess your risk for lung cancer; then take measures to prevent the disease.

What are the risk factors for lung cancer?

Vegetables and chicken are about all that Robbin Cobb and her husband, William, have eaten since he was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago.

Robbin Cobb, 50, a certified Master Gardener, realizes not everyone knows about the importance of eating fresh fruit and veggies — rich in cancer-fighting antioxidants and other nutrients. So on Thursday, she lent her green thumb to a new cancer-prevention initiative of the Little Red Door Cancer Agency: a small community garden.

In the following video, Helen Ross, M.D., a medical oncologist at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, provides an overview of what women should know about lung cancer.

Lung cancer has become one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths among women.

Women of every age know the threat that breast cancer poses. Girls grow up watching their mothers march against it, and that activism has brought much needed resources and attention to the disease. Yet the cancer that kills more women each year than breast, ovarian and cervical cancers combined is lung cancer. Because it was once mostly a male disease, and because it is associated with smoking, women assume if they never smoked, or if they stopped years ago, they don’t need to be on the lookout for this deadly cancer.

But they do. Two-thirds of lung cancer’s female victims quit at least a decade earlier or never smoked at all.

A new report on lung cancer in women has been published by the Women’s Health Policy and Advocacy Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Called “Out of the Shadows,” the report seeks to raise awareness about lung cancer, currently the leading cause of cancer death in women, and more importantly, to increase funding for research for its prevention, detection and treatment. (Thanks to Booster Shots, the LA Times‘ fabulous health blog, for highlighting the report.) I encourage you to read the report, which is well written and comprehensive.

For a more scientific summary of the issues, I would point you to December’s Seminars in Oncology, a special issue devoted to lung cancer in women.

Heart and liver transplant recipients are at particularly high risk of developing lung cancer after receiving the donated organ, researchers report at the 2nd European Lung Cancer Conference. They are advising doctors to screen for such cancers in these patients to maximize the chance of detecting the malignancy early.

Doctors have known for decades that the immunosuppressive drugs given to transplant patients increase their risk of developing new cancers. In transplant patients, the risk of developing a malignant tumor ranges from 4% to 18% and may be 100-fold higher than in the general population. The most common malignancies after transplantation are cancers of the lips and skin, lymphoproliferative disorders and Kaposi’s sarcoma.

The number of women diagnosed with lung cancer is soaring, but federal funding for research lags even though the disease is more common than cancer of the breast, prostate, and colon—combined. A new report drills down on research about women and lung cancer, sorting out findings about incidence, gender disparities, and survival. Perhaps most interesting, “all federal spending for lung cancer research amounts to $1,249 for each lung cancer death,” Richard Know writes for NPR. “Spending for breast cancer research is 21 times higher—$27,480 per death.”