What Lung Cancer Is

Dr. Patel describes lung cancer, which is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the lung.

Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the United States. Most of our patients present with advanced disease. A small number of patients, about 15% of the 200,000 Americans who will be diagnosed in 2007, will have early stage disease. For those patients, surgery is the treatment modality of choice, and some patients we give chemotherapy after surgery. About 35,000 patients will have locally advanced disease or stage III disease, and for those patients treatment is chemotherapy, radiation, and sometimes even surgery. We tend to do multi-modality therapy, which comes at the price of some toxicity because some patients are cured from their disease. Patients who have stage IV disease, or metastatic disease, have disease that has gone outside of the lung into another part of their body through their bloodstream or through their lymphatic channel.