Study On The Causes Of Lung Cancer, Its Treatment And Prevention Methods

I chose the topic of lung cancer because I have a family member that suffered the fatal fate of lung cancer. My grandpa was only in his 60’s when cancer struck and by the time he found out that he had lung cancer, it was already too late. His lungs suffered a great deal of damage from, what doctors thought, cigarettes which may have greatly increased his chances for the tumor to form. At the time I thought this sadistic cell formation as just a natural part of life but as I grew older I started to question it more and more.

This led me to become curious as to why lung cancer occurs in people and left me questioning what the leading causes of lung cancer are in my own country, the US. With all of the amazing medical technology that has been created and is being created, I’ve become astonishingly unaware of all that is happening to try and prevent lung cancer. In order to figure out the causes of lung cancer, we must know what lung cancer is, how screening can let people know if they have it, what possible treatments there are and what the curability of lung cancer is, and finally what the correlation between lung cancer and cigarettes is.

One must understand the basics of lung cancer to understand what it is and what causes it. “Lung cancer is a type of cancer that begins in the lungs. The lungs are two spongy organs in your chest that take in oxygen when one inhales and release carbon dioxide when he or she exhales” (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor). Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer in the United States, killing more people than colon, prostate, and breast cancer combined (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor).

The cancer is not something to be overlooked, especially with the number of people that develop it every year. Some symptoms that people may see are chest pain, unexpectedly losing weight, headaches, shortness of breath, coughing up any amount of blood, or a new cough that just won’t go away (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor). There are two types of lung cancer that have been identified by the Mayo Clinic Staff, editor and those are small cell lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. Small cell lung cancer seems to be more prevalent in smokers. Non-small cell lung cancer includes a lot of different variations of lung cancer which include but are not limited to squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, and large cell carcinoma (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor).

There are various causes for all types of lung cancer, some include smoking, second-hand smoke, radon, carcinogens at work, eating unhealthily, and not exercising can all increase a person’s chance of developing lung cancer (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor).'The link between indoor radon exposure and lung cancer development has been studied for the last few decades. Epidemiological observations in the 1980s and 1990s revealed lung cancer as the main health effect associated with radon progeny inhalation in uranium mines” (Malinovsky).

Radon is a very large threat to health and wasn’t discovered until people started mining uranium where radon is more prevalent. Radon comes from the breakdown of dirt and uranium. This has been a problem is houses that scientists have just now discovered in recent years. As the dirt under houses decomposes the radon that is produced has nowhere else to go except, up into the house. Companies have been made and will install devices that will remove radon and monitor the levels so people aren’t at risk of developing diseases associated with radon exposure (Malinovsky).

There are multiple ways to tell if someone has lung cancer but one of the major ways is lung cancer screening. Lung cancer screening, essentially, is a CT scan or X-RAYS that are aimed in the lung region in an attempt to find abnormal cell growth that may end up being a tumor (NCL staff, editor). There have been tests to see which form of lung cancer screening is better and in a study called the National Lung Screening Trial, which was conducted between 2002 and 2009.

The NLST enrolled about 53,000 people aged between 55 and 74 who had a smoking history of 30 pack-years or more. It tested standard chest x-rays against low-dose computerized tomography (CT)--an enhanced X-ray-based technique. Participants were screened once a year for three years. At the end of the trial, those who had been CT-scanned were 20% less likely than those who had been X-rayed to have died from lung cancer. (“Gathering the evidence; Lung cancer”)

There are multiple issues with lung cancer screening, however, “as the number of individuals seeking lung cancer screening with [low-dose CT] increases, so too will the number of individuals undergoing invasive diagnostic procedures as a result of abnormal findings” (NCL staff, editor). This means that when people get screened that there might be abnormalities found that have nothing to do with lung cancer but doctors might want to check it out anyway, costing people a lot more money than they intended on spending. Most abnormalities are nothing to worry about, however, the doctors working on this, one of them being Dr. Shih, says that the number of false-positive results may be a big issue. She wants the screening to be better perfected so doctors don't misinterpret the results and cause patients to go through unnecessary treatments (NCL staff, editor).

Treatments for lung cancer and if lung cancer can be treated by other means than just chemotherapy have been all the rage lately and getting to a stage where a treatment has been found takes a long time. One thing that companies do in order to test if one of their drugs work in clinical trials. Performing clinical trials for lung cancer is a difficult process to get through. A lot of patients have different kinds of lung cancer that come from different gene mutations in the body. So, if a company is trying to create a targeted treatment the company would first need to find people that qualify for their specific treatment (which is hard to come by).

It's difficult to find people that qualify because, in order to find people who would qualify, clinical scans would need to be done. Most people that a company would screen wouldn't be the correct kind of cancer they are looking to treat which wastes both their time and the patient's time. Therefore, it takes a significant amount of time to find people that fit the company's niche. If the drug doesn't work then a new drug would have to be created which could take years of trial and error (Worley). All of this falls under targeted treatment. Targeted treatment, essentially, is a treatment that focuses on one type of lung cancer. Targeted treatments to certain types of lung cancer have been at the forefront of lung cancer treatment but there isn't a broad treatment for all lung cancer.

One of the main problems with targeted treatments is that people become resistant to the treatment. There are a couple of questions that come along with this. Whether the treatment can become stronger to adapt to the body becoming resistant if another treatment works better and for a longer time, or if there is a treatment that won't become resistant to the body and could potentially cure the cancer (Worley). All of these questions are still trying to be answered by scientists and although targeted treatments are working somewhat now they have a lot of room for improvement in the future. One of the major drugs that a company has been working on is called the Amgen Drug. The Amgen Drug is a type of targeted treatment that targets a specific gene mutation known as KRAS (Beasley).

In fact, 'Out of 13 lung cancer patients taking a 960-milligram dose of AMG510, seven had tumors shrink by at least 30%, according to data presented in Barcelona at the World Conference on Lung Cancer. Cancer was stabilized in the other six high-dose patients” (Beasley). The Amgen Drug has shown significant improvement towards being able to fight off lung cancer and could lead to a cure to this specific kind of small-cell lung cancer. The drug isn’t perfect however and doesn’t work for everybody. In one of the company's studies, only 50% of the patient's cancer shrunk while some were left unaffected. Some patients died showing the drug isn't perfect but it definitely helps and is better than nothing. Most of the time once someone starts to notice symptoms of lung cancer it is already too late. Seeing some people get better due to this drug is a great stride in the medical field when it comes to treating this form of cancer (Beasley). There have been great strides in the advancement of treatments towards lung cancer but there is still much more to be done in order to cure it.

Cigarettes have shown to be one of the greatest causes of lung cancer in all of human history. They infiltrate the lungs and breakdown the cells. There have been many pictures published that show the difference between a person with lungs that haven’t smoked a day in his or her life and a picture of a person’s lungs that have been smoking for 30 years every day. The difference is very significant. The non-smoker's lungs are pink and plump while the smoker's lungs are almost black and shriveled (“Gathering the evidence; Lung cancer”). Cigarettes can cause the lungs to collapse which makes it so someone is unable to breathe through that lung and can potentially be fatal if that person doesn’t see a doctor right away. Cigarettes are also very addictive and even against someone’s better judgment can still make people smoke them even though they know cigarettes are very bad for them (“Gathering the evidence; Lung cancer”). There have also been smoking commercials put on by the American Lung Association that depict people who have had to have tubes put in their throats to be able to talk, they most likely had to do this procedure because of a collapsed lung. As said by the Mayo Clinic Staff, editor, People who smoke have the greatest risk of lung cancer, though lung cancer can also occur in people who have never smoked. The risk of lung cancer increases with the length of time and number of cigarettes a person has smoked.” Even if a person has smoked for years, stopping can help significantly in a person’s chances to not develop lung cancer.

Smoking has been shown to increase a person’s chances of lung cancer because smoking increases the chances for the cells in the lungs to become cancerous which is a chance in the DNA that causes the cell to go through mitosis rapidly and cannot be stopped by body hormones. They keep reproducing as if they are not connected to the body, however, the cancerous cells feed off of the nutrients the body is already providing (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor). The chances of this can all be decreased if someone doesn’t smoke. As some people may know secondhand smoke can still affect someone the same way smoking a cigarette does. It may not be direct but some of the chemicals are still getting into the body which can increase a person’s chances of getting lung cancer (Mayo Clinic Staff, editor).

Lung cancer remains the deadliest among all kinds of cancer and can be easily overlooked. There have been great strides in understanding the cancer at its roots and how to treat all of the various forms, but still, there is much more to be done. This world is all about information and whether people find that information is up to them. So, by understanding what lung cancer is, how people are screened for it, what possible treatments are out there, and how cigarettes correlate to the formation of lung cancer people can better understand what it is and what they can do to prevent themselves from developing it.