How is lung cancer treated?
The choice of treatment options for each person will depend upon the stage of the disease and the person’s general state of health. Several kinds of treatment are available. Chemotherapy or a combination of chemotherapy and radiation therapy are the most common treatments for small cell lung cancer. Surgery is usually the treatment of lung cancers that are localized (i.e., have not spread). Radiation therapy and chemotherapy are often used because the disease has spread by the time it is diagnosed.
Most lung cancer is hard to treat. The best way to fight lung cancer is to never start smoking or to stop smoking. If you need help to stop smoking, talk to your doctor. A government website all about quitting smoking can also help you kick the habit. Lung cancer can be treated in a number of different ways including a combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Most of the time treatment does not cure the cancer but stops it from spreading and relieves symptoms. Your specific treatment will depend on: • kind of lung cancer, • where the cancer is and if it has spread to other parts of the body, • your age, • and overall health. Radiation therapy uses a machine to aim high-energy x rays at the tumor. This energy kills cancer cells. Radiation therapy can relieve pain and make a person feel better. Chemotherapy uses medicine to kill cancer cells. Chemotherapy medicines can be injected into a vein or taken as a pill. Surgery is used to remove tumors. To find out about research stu
• Answer: To treat lung cancer, surgery to remove the tumor, radiation (X-rays that kill or shrink cancer cells directed at the site of the tumor), chemotherapy (systemic drugs that kill all fast-growing cells in the body including cancer cells), and potentially experimental treatments are all part of your doctors tool box. Before deciding on which treatment or combination of treatments is right for you, your doctor will have to determine how advanced your lung cancer is, a process called staging.
There are three major ways of treating cancer. Surgery, radiation and chemotheray. Surgery and radiation are used to treat localized tumors. Chemotherapy treats the whole body, aiming at cells that have broken away from the cancer source. Surgery – Washington University has a dedicated thoracic surgery unit – a suite of hospital rooms designed for thoracic (chest) operations. Each year, our surgeons perform about 400 lung removals. They may remove a lobe of the lung (lobectomy), an entire lung on one side of the chest (pneumonectomy), or just the part of the lung affected by the cancer (lobectomy), the most common procedure. Lobectomies have a lower risk of the cancer returning and a good survival rate. Surgeons remove an entire lung – a pneumonectomy – only when absolutely necessary. Instead, they often perform a so-called “sleeve resection,” in which the cancer in the main bronchus is removed and the ends reconnected to keep the healthy part of the lung. The “sleeve” surgery is more
