LungBlog

A team at Roche’s biotechnology unit Genentech in California compared all the genetic changes in a single patient’s lung tumor with healthy tissue from the patient, a 51-year-old man who had smoked an average of 25 cigarettes per day for 15 years before the tumor was removed.

What they found were as many as 50,000 genetic mutations.

“Fifty thousand is a huge number. No one has ever reported such a high number,” said Zemin Zhang of Genentech, whose findings appear in the journal Nature.

“This is likely associated with the smoking history of the patient. It is very alarming,” Zhang said in a telephone interview.

Smoking is the biggest single cause of lung cancer, and studies suggest mutations occur with each cigarette smoked.

SKINNY smokers, beware. Thinner smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer than their fatter counterparts, researchers found in a survey here.

And compared with slender non-smokers, slim people who light up are 11 times more likely to contract the disease.

But the study’s lead author, National University of Singapore epidemiologist Koh Woon Puay, emphasised that those who smoke are still more likely to contract lung cancer overall than those who do not. Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in men here, and the third most common in women.

In April 2008, 60-year-old Cheryl Rose got a bad cough that wouldn’t go away.

Her doctors thought she had asthma — a bizarre turn for a woman who had never had difficulty breathing, not even during frequent workouts at the gym.

A few weeks later, an X-ray revealed that her right lung was filling with fluid at a frightening rate. Doctors told Rose, a woman who lived a healthy lifestyle and had never taken regular medications, that she probably wouldn’t live to see 2009.

Quitting smoking after a diagnosis of early-stage lung cancer may reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and death. These results were published in the British Medical Journal.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, with an estimated 159,000 deaths each year.

Smoking cessation is known to reduce a smoker’s risk of developing lung cancer, but less is known about the effect of smoking cessation after a lung cancer diagnosis.

Quitting smoking after being diagnosed with lung cancer can prolong life and reduce the risk of a cancer recurrence or the development of a new lung cancer, according to research published online ahead of print in the British Medical Journal.

One out of 14 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer during their lifetime. Unfortunately only 16 percent will survive, because the majority will be diagnosed too late, when the cancer has already spread beyond the lungs. Lung cancer remains the country’s number one cancer killer. It is expected to take the lives of more than 160,000 Americans this year, more than prostate, breast, melanoma, liver and kidney cancers combined.

Smokers with lung cancer who have asked “Why quit now, I’m already sick?” may find new motivation in this answer: Doing so could double their odds of survival over five years.

A report published online today in BMJ suggests that people who give up smoking after being diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer live longer than patients who continue the habit.

Quitting smoking after a diagnosis of early stage lung cancer doubles the odds that a patient will live another five years, a new study finds.

“The results are quite dramatic. I don’t think anybody would have expected such a dramatic difference. It’s incredible,” said Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association. “The important caveat is that this is early lung cancer.”

Repeated exposure to tobacco smoke makes lung cancer much worse, and one reason is that it steps up inflammation in the lung. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that mice with early lung cancer lesions that were repeatedly exposed to tobacco smoke developed larger tumors – and developed tumors more quickly – than unexposed animals. The key contributing factor was lung tissue inflammation.

Repeated exposure to tobacco smoke makes lung cancer much worse, and one reason is that it steps up inflammation in the lung. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that mice with early lung cancer lesions that were repeatedly exposed to tobacco smoke developed larger tumors – and developed tumors more quickly – than unexposed animals. The key contributing factor was lung tissue inflammation.