Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer - Highlights

Highlights

Overview

• Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. and worldwide. Non-small cell lung cancer accounts for 85% of cases.
• Lung cancer develops when genetic mutations (changes) occur in a normal cell within the lung. As a result, the cell reproduces endlessly and becomes a cancer. The mutations that cause cancer are produced by complex interactions between environmental factors and inherited factors.

Risk:

• Smoking appears to be the primary risk factor in 85 - 90% of lung cancers. The latest evidence suggests that newly diagnosed patients with early stage lung cancer who quit smoking can significantly improve their outcomes.
• Research suggests that postmenopausal women taking combined hormone replacement therapy (estrogen plus progestin) have a higher risk of death from non-small cell lung cancer than women not taking hormones.

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Diagnosis:

• The use of PET scan along with CT scans is only helpful in some cases and has not proben to be highly reliable. Recent evidence suggests that PET-CT with cranial imaging may help identify advanced disease and spare patients whose cancer is too advanced from surgery, but may also incorrectly show more advanced disease in patients (which may lead to less than optimal treatment options).

Treatment:

• Staging is an important part of a patient's treatment plan. After a rigorous review of current data, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) has revised the lung cancer staging system. Additional delineations in tumor size and other descriptors were added to the non-small cell lung cancer staging system.
• Research has focused on drugs that block small molecules involved with the growth of blood vessels that feed the tumor (a process called angiogenesis), for use as second line treatment.
• One of these drugs, gefitinib (Iressa), is being studied as a first line agent for selected pateints with earlier stages of lung cancer, when gene testing suggests the tumor may respond.

Review Date: 07/01/2010
Reviewed By: Harvey Simon, MD, Editor-in-Chief, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc.

A.D.A.M., Inc. is accredited by URAC, also known as the American Accreditation HealthCare Commission (www.urac.org).