Detecting Lung Cancer Blog

Most lung cancer is found symptomatically and usually it is late stage cancer. The key benefit of early detection is the potential to catch the cancer early when there are more treatment options for the patient.

Here are two of their stories:

In the About.com article Lung Cancer Signs and Symptoms, it states that “Women now account for half of all new cases of lung cancer. Between 1974 and 1994, lung cancer deaths increased 150% in women, while men experienced only a 20% increase.”

Detecting lung cancer early continues to be very difficult. It’s not that there aren’t symptoms, it’s that the symptoms are not always clearly those of lung cancer and, often, they appear only when the cancer is well advanced.

Until a few years ago, not many people had heard of radon gas, much less developed concern about it as a risk factor for lung cancer. All that has changed, however.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 178,000 women in the United States die from tobacco smoking. Approximately 45,000 of them die of lung cancer. More women die from smoking-related lung cancer than from smoking-related heart disease (40,000) and chronic lung disease (42,000).

The apparent dangers of secondhand tobacco smoke have been in the news for years, and has been blamed for a number of illnesses, including lung cancer. To help remove this lung cancer risk factor, many cities in the United States have initiated smoking bans in and near public buildings.

In terms of awareness and research funding, lung cancer does not appear in the forefront.

On first blush, this should be surprising because lung cancer causes more deaths in the United States than melanoma, kidney, prostate, liver, breast and colon cancers combined.

It’s also surprising that early detection of lung cancer occurs much less often than the detection of colon cancer, for example. This failure to detect lung cancer in its early stages – when there can still be an impact on outcomes – has resulted in a five-year survival rate as low as 3.5 percent for patients whose cancer has spread to distant organs, and 15 percent overall.

Everyone has been exposed to asbestos, but for most people it is not a lung cancer risk factor. The mineral is present in the environment, in soil, air and water, but environmental asbestos of this kind occurs at levels too low to cause harm.

It’s fairly easy to find lists of lung cancer risk factors and symptoms, and it’s important to know what the risk factors and symptoms are. Equally as important, however, is knowing how these risk factors (smoking is at the top of the list) translate into the chances of getting lung cancer, especially because the symptoms are likely to appear only when the disease is advanced and the five-year survival rate is low.

There are two main points to be made when discussing why women, in particular, should think about early detection of lung cancer.