Are most people with non—small cell lung cancer smokers?
About 15 percent have never smoked. Another 40 percent have quit smoking. So the majority of lung cancers these days occur in people who are not currently smoking. The lungs go close to being back to normal after you quit, but are not quite normal. Still, the biggest thing you can do to reduce your risk is stop smoking. How is non—small cell lung cancer usually discovered? The most common way it appears is with a cough and shortness of breath. Typically, patients come in to the doctor’s office and get treated for some type of upper respiratory tract infection, and then it’s only when these symptoms don’t go away that a chest X-ray is eventually taken. What’s the first step in treatment? The first step is to make a diagnosis and that’s usually done by some type of biopsy. The second major step is staging the cancer, which means figuring out how far has it spread, because that will ultimately determine what the appropriate treatment is. When it comes to non—small cell lung cancer, we hav
