Lung Cancer

The doctors diagnose the cancer and determine what kind it is by looking at a sample of the tumor under a microscope. This alone does not determine what treatment you can have. Before treatment, your doctors must determine if or how much the lung cancer has spread. This is called staging the cancer.

The outlook for your recovery and your treatment options, which may include surgery, radiation therapy or chemotherapy depend upon the stage of the cancer. If lung cancer is found and treated with surgery before it has spread to lymph nodes or other organs, the five-year survival rate is about 42%. Knowing accurately whether you are a candidate for surgery is critical at this early point in time.

PET is the most useful test that you can have when doctors are staging or re-staging lung cancer because it is more accurate than CT or any other test.

How PET works: In cancer, cells begin to grow at a much faster rate, feeding on sugars like glucose. PET works by using a small amount of a radioactive drug called a tracer in combination with a compound such as glucose. Once you are injected with the tracer and glucose, the tracer travels through your body. It emits signals as it travels and eventually collects in the organs targeted for examination. If an area in an organ is cancerous, the signals will be stronger since more glucose will be absorbed in those areas.

In the lungs, if the cancer has affected the nearby lymph nodes, they will take up more of the radioactive glucose. Whether or not lymph nodes are involved is a critical factor in deciding whether you can have surgery to remove the lung cancer. CT scanning which looks at the size of the lymph nodes, on average is only about 68% accurate in determining if the lymph nodes have been affected. PET is more than 82% accurate in determining the same thing. In the same whole-body picture, the PET scan can look throughout your whole body to see if there are any clumps of the cancer cells that have spread. The PET scan can make the difference in your recovery.

The type of treatment that can be done is based on both type of cancer cells and the stage. If the tests show that the cancer has not spread too far when it is first found, then surgery to remove it is done. Along with the surgery, your doctor may also recommend chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy as well.

In general, however, if the cancer has spread, it is treated by chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy. Lung cancer can spread to nearly anywhere in the body, but most commonly it spreads to the brain, bone and liver. After first showing the doctors where the cancer cells are, PET can also see if the chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy has been effective in killing them.

Call the doctors at the PET centers nearest you if you have lung cancer and would like to discuss whether PET would be useful in your care.