Lung Cancer

9 Pages 2331 Words

There are many people today that are effected one way or another by lung cancer and don’t really know that much about the disease. I was recently seriously affected by it. My uncle, Will, passed away on September 17, 2000. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996. It was extremely hard on the entire family. At first nobody really knew anything about the disease except that it was very rare for it to be cured. So then we decided to do some research and learn more about everything that our uncle was going through.
Most lung cancers start in the lining of the bronchi and are thought to develop over a period of many years. There first may be areas of precancerous changes in the lung. These changes do not form a mass or tumor and cannot be seen on an x-ray and they do not cause symptoms. If these precancerous changes turn into true cancer, malignant cells begin to grow. The cancer cells may produce chemicals that cause new blood vessels to form nearby. These new blood cells nourish the cancer cells can continue to grow and form tumor large enough to seen on x-rays. Cancer cells can break away from the original tumor and spread to other parts this is called metastasis. Lung cancer is a life-threatening disease because it often spreads in this way even before x-rays can detect it.
There are two major types of lung cancer. The first type is small cell lung cancer (SCLC). The secondtype is non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Sometimes a lung cancer may have characteristics of both types. This is called mixed small/large cell carcinoma.
About 20% of all lung cancers are small cell lung cancer. It is named simply for the size of the cancer cells. Even though the cells are small, they can multiply quickly and form large tumors, and can spread to lymph nodes and other organs such as the bones, brain, adrenal glands and liver. Small cell lung cancer often starts in the bronchi and towards the center of the lungs. Smoki...