How can we prevent lung cancer?
Lung cancer is the most frequent malignant tumor in men and already in women also in terms of mortality, and we know that 90% of patients suffering from lung cancer are smokers or have been smokers.
Smoking a pack a day for 20 years already increases the risk of getting lung cancer, therefore, the prevention of lung cancer is basic to stop smoking if you have started or never started smoking. It is important for schools, colleges, families… to be aware of this fact because there is no closer relationship between a possible cause -such as tobacco- and lung cancer in the rest of the body.
Prevention: not smoking or quitting smoking. It is always a good time to quit smoking, even if you have been smoking for 30 years, when you stop smoking you maintain a risk that we can try to prevent, but you have to stop smoking to reduce the risk to almost the same as if you had never smoked, and this is from 10 to 15 years after quitting smoking.
How can we diagnose lung cancer early and treat it?
The diagnosis of lung cancer is usually quite late because they are lesions that are inside the lung and that do not show symptoms until they are advanced. We know that smokers or ex-smokers have a high risk of lung cancer and it has already been demonstrated that by performing a thoracic CAT scan, a scanner, we can diagnose small nodules early in patients with a high risk of contracting lung cancer, such as smokers or ex-smokers.
Thoracic CT is a non-aggressive test, with little radiation, and it has been able to diagnose tumors of a much smaller size than when the patient comes in with symptoms, and this has led to an enormous improvement in the survival rate of lung cancer.
Research over the last 2 years tells us that not only does the patient who is diagnosed early benefit from this test with the thoracic scanner or CAT scan, but also that 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 given up smoking, we have a period of about 10 years in which the possibilities of developing it still persist and it is at that time when we can perform an annual or biannual thoracic CT scan to diagnose lung cancer early and improve survival. Logically, with a smaller tumor we can make more limited or less aggressive treatments, surgery has changed and the survival rate with early diagnosis has also changed.
The ultimate goal is for people to stop smoking, but even though we have the most advanced non-smoking protection law, 30% of the Spanish population is still smokers and therefore at risk of suffering from lung cancer. We must tell people to stop smoking and the early diagnosis must be carried out by means of this thoracic CT test.