Lung Cancer Treatment Improvements
- Death rates from cancer have dropped for the second year in a row.
- The decrease in the death rate is largely due to improvements in treating lung cancer.
- Patients with lung cancer are living longer, thanks to new therapies and improved treatments.
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The War on Cancer
Read MoreImproved Therapies for Lung Cancer
However, new data recently published in A Cancer Journal for Clinicians one of the peer-reviewed journals of The American Cancer Society provides evidence that the cancer death rate continues to fall and for the second year in a row is driven by reductions in deaths due to lung cancer. Unlike with previous interventions, the reduction in lung cancer mortality has been attributed to improvements in treatments and new therapies.
One treatment that has allowed for significant progress in lung cancer is immunotherapy. "Immunotherapies for lung cancer, which won the Nobel prize in 2018, are actually preventing people from dying," Dr. Otis Brawley, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, tells SurvivorNet. Brawley previously served as Chief Medical and Scientific Officer for the American Cancer Society. "It is rare that in cancer epidemiology, that you can point to one treatment, and say that overall death rate from all cancers is going down because this one treatment became available. In this case we can do that."
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New therapies such as immunotherapy and targeted therapies have changed the landscape in treating lung cancer. These therapies initially showed improvements in patients with advanced and metastatic disease. However, overtime studies proved that these therapies also have benefits in patients with earlier-stage disease. These therapies are now being used in combination with surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy to help cure their disease in the early stages before cancer has time to spread and become advanced.
Dr. Jim Allison, Chair of the Department of Immunology at MD Anderson Cancer Center, talked about the effectiveness of combining immunotherapy as a complementary treatment to traditional "targeted" therapies like chemotherapy and radiation for many types of cancer. Simply put, he says: "We now know it works… and so it's something out there that can offer patients a bit of hope."
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It has been 50 years since The National Cancer Act of 1971 was signed into law and the war on cancer rages on. However, patients and providers alike are realizing new hope as improvements in therapies once again drive lung cancer death rates lower and reduce the overall death rate from lung cancer for the second year in a row.
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