Prevention and diagnosis of lung cancer

How can we prevent lung cancer?

Lung cancer is the most common malignant tumor in men and women in terms of mortality, and we know that 90% of patients with lung cancer are smokers or have been smokers.

Smoking a pack a day for 20 years already increases the risk of getting lung cancer elevated, therefore, lung cancer prevention is basic to stop smoking if you have started or never start smoking. It is important that from schools, schools, families ... this fact is known because there is no closer relationship between a possible cause - such as smoking - and lung cancer in the rest of the body.

Prevention: no smoking or smoking cessation. It is always a good time to stop smoking, even if the person has been smoking for 30 years, when he stops smoking he maintains a risk that we can try to prevent, but we must stop smoking to reduce the risk to almost the same as the one who had not smoked never, and this is from the 10 or 15 years of having quit smoking.

How can we diagnose in time and treat lung cancer?

The diagnosis of lung cancer is usually quite late because they are lesions that are inside the lung and do not give symptoms until they are advanced. We know that the smoker or ex-smoker has a high risk of lung cancer and it has already been shown that by performing a chest CT scan, we can early diagnose small nodules in patients at high risk of lung cancer, such as smokers or ex-smokers.

Chest CT scan is a non-aggressive test with little radiation and has determined to diagnose tumors of a size much smaller than that presented when the patient comes with symptoms, and this has made the survival of lung cancer greatly improved .

Research in the last 2 years tells us that not only does the patient benefit who is diagnosed early by this test with the chest CT scan, but lung cancer mortality has been improved by 20% by performing this early diagnosis. The best prevention is, of course, not to smoke , in the case of those who have quit smoking we have a period of about 10 years in which the chances of developing it still persist and it is at that moment that we can perform on an annual or bi-annually a chest CT scan to diagnose lung cancer early and improve survival. Logically with a smaller tumor we can make treatments more limited or less aggressive, surgery has changed and survival rate with early diagnosis as well.

The final objective is that people stop smoking but having the most advanced law of non-smoker protection still 30% of the Spanish population is smoker and therefore at risk of suffering from lung cancer. We should tell people to quit smoking and early diagnosis to do so using this chest CT test.