Lung Cancer is one of the most fatal as well as the most common types of cancer among men. It’s mostly caused by smoking and consuming other tobacco products. However, there are many men who have never smoked and yet are diagnosed with Lung Cancer. Known to be a challenging cancer to treat, let’s read on to know the different treatments for lung cancer.
In today’s era, we can see school boys smoking and consuming other tobacco products just to look cool in front of their peers. Many men who are working in stressful professions smoke a lot as they are unable to take all of that stress. According to them, smoking helps them to relax, however, they probably do not know (or ignore the fact) that smoking is leading them to lung cancer.
Treatments for Lung Cancer can cost you a lot as well as can be painful. In order to diagnose Lung Cancer, there are certain tests that a man has to go through to make sure that he has Lung Cancer. These tests are imaging tests, sputum cytology and tissue sample or biopsy.
If a man is diagnosed with Lung Cancer, he has to talk to his doctor about the different treatments for Lung Cancer that he can go for. Let’s have a look at these treatments for Lung Cancer below.
Surgery
Surgery is the primary treatment option for men with Lung Cancer but at an early stage. The goal of surgery is to totally remove all the tumour cells and thereby provide a cure. There can be different procedures or surgeries to remove lung cancer, such as:
Wedge resection to remove a small section of lung that contains the tumour along with a margin of healthy tissue.
Segmental resection to remove a larger portion of lung, but not an entire lobe.
Lobectomy to remove the entire lobe of one lung.
Pneumonectomy to remove an entire lung.
Radiation Therapy
Radiation therapy uses high-powered energy beams from sources such as X-rays and protons to kill cancer cells. During radiation therapy, you lie on a table while a machine that moves around you, directing radiation to precise points on your body. It can also be used before the surgery to shrink the tumour or after surgery to kill the remaining cancer cells. This is often the case for men who may not be healthy enough to have surgery or whose cancer has spread too far to have surgery.
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy is a treatment which uses drugs to kill cancer cells. You usually receive chemotherapy by direct injection into a vein or through a catheter placed in a large vein. Chemotherapy is used mainly after the surgery to kill any cancer cells that may have remained. It can be used alone or combined with radiation therapy. Chemotherapy may also be used before surgery to shrink cancers and make them easier to remove.
Targeted Therapy
Targeted therapy is like chemotherapy that goes throughout the body in search for tumour cells. These are drugs that target specific parts of cancer cells or nearby cells that help them grow. So far, these drugs have only been found to be useful for some non small cell lung cancers.
Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy is one of the treatments for lung cancer that uses your immune system to fight cancer. A man’s immune system may not attack his cancer because the cancer cells produce proteins that help them hide from the immune system cells. Immunotherapy works by interfering with that process.
Conclusion
While there are a lot of treatments for lung cancer, it is still a fatal disease and these treatments might fail at saving a man. The best way of staying away from lung cancer is by saying no to smoking and other tobacco products. Apart from that, passive smoking can lead to lung cancer too, so if anyone in your family or friends smokes or consumes tobacco, it is better to talk to them and make them understand how deadly it is.