Cure For Lung Cancer
Although there are several kinds of lung cancer, only one, bronchial carcinoma, is common, and it is almost always caused by lung damage from smoking.
Inhaled tobacco smoke damages the cells that line the bronchi, and many scientists believe that the damaged cells themselves represent an early stage of cancer. Some of these cells may gradually form a wart like tumor, which is the starting point of bronchial carcinoma. As the tumor grows, it spreads into the lungs from the bronchi. The cancer cells often get into the bloodstream and are carried to the brain, liver, bone, and skin where they establish metastases, or secondary cancers that also can be very dangerous.
What are the Symptoms?
The first symptom of bronchial carcinoma is usually a cough, which is most often an increase in your smoker's cough. The disease is closely associated with chronic bronchitis . More than half of the people who develop lung cancer have had bronchitis for years. Along with the cough there is generally some phlegm, which may be blood stained. You may also be a little breathless. Often you will have chest pains. They are either sharp pains that become sharper when you take a deep breath, or dull and persistent pains. You may sometimes wheeze.
Sometimes the first symptoms of lung cancer occur in other organs to which the cancer has spread. Bronchial carcinoma spreads in about one out of eight cases, and it is in those cases that the secondary cancer may alert your physician to the primary cancer of the lung. The symptoms of the secondary cancer depend on where the cancer cells have settled. If they are in your brain, you may have headaches, feel confused, or have an epileptic fit or a stroke. In the bones the symptoms are pain, swelling, or even fracture. If the cancer is in your skin, cystlike swellings appear. If it is in your liver the symptoms may be indigestion, dyspepsia, and eventually jaundice.
What are the Risks?
Bronchial carcinoma is the most common form of cancer in the Western world. It affects more men than women, probably because lung cancer takes a long time to develop, and men smoked much more than women did 20 to 40 years ago. There has recently been a drop in the incidence of the disease among men and a rise in the incidence among women. This may be because men are smoking less than they did before, and many women only began to smoke heavily after World War II was over.
Your chances of getting the disease vary according to how much you smoke. If you have never smoked, you probably will not get bronchial carcinoma. Light smokers are ten times as susceptible as non-smokers, and heavy smokers are 25 times as susceptible. As soon as you stop smoking, the danger begins to decrease. After ten years of non-smoking, you have just about the same chance of escaping coming down with bronchial cancer as do lifelong non-smokers.
If lung cancer is discovered early, either as soon as the symptoms develop, or by a routine chest X-ray, the affected portion of the lung can sometimes be removed surgically. Less than ten per cent of the people who get lung cancer are cured by surgery combined with radiation therapy and chemotherapy, however. Most people who have lung cancer do not seek help until the cancer has spread beyond the point where surgery can be effective. Smokers increase their risk of contracting not only cancer, but also several other life-threatening diseases associated with smoking. These include coronary artery disease stroke and chronic bronchitis .
What should be Done?
To avoid bronchial carcinoma, stop smoking now, even if you do not have a smoker's cough . A tumor takes years to develop, and if you remove the cause, the process may slow down or even stop. If you are experiencing symptoms such as increasingly severe smoker's cough, chest pains, and blood in the phlegm, see your physician, who will probably listen to your chest with a stethoscope and arrange for a chest X-ray. If the X-ray shows signs of possible cancer, you may be referred to a chest specialist, who may use a bronchoscope to look for cancerous growths in your bronchi. If there are such growths, their location can be more firmly established by bronchoscopy than by X-ray.
What is the Treatment?
Self-help: No self-help is possible, except for giving up smoking.
Professional help: Surgical removal of the cancer is the best possible treatment for bronchial carcinoma, but in about two-thirds of the cases the cancer turns out to be too advanced for total removal when the chest is opened. Radiation therapy slows down the progress of the cancer and may relieve the symptoms for months or sometimes years.
Another possibility is treatment with cytotoxic drugs. These drugs kill cancer cells while doing little, or at least less, damage to normal cells. This treatment, also called chemotherapy, is similar to methods that have proved effective in cancers such as Hodgkin's disease and leukemia. The treatment takes several months, and cytotoxic drugs have unpleasant side-effects, but the results are promising. Since this treatment is comparatively new, and different drugs are being tried, the results of long-term research trials are not yet available. However, it offers the best prospect for cure where surgery is not feasible.
The choice of which treatment is most suitable for you depends on the extent of the disease, what the biopsy, or laboratory examination of a piece of the tumor, shows and your general health. Discuss the possibilities with your physician. Although a diagnosis of lung cancer is serious, it is possible to treat it and sometimes to cure it.