Info Mesothelioma
Asbestos Related Lung Cancer – Facts you should know
asbestos and lung cancer
The link between asbestos and lung cancer is well known today. Asbestos also included a wide range of products.
Suspicions that exposure to asbestos can cause serious health problems existed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It is believed that those who are interested in promoting the use of asbestos has acted to discredit such reports.
In 1931 the British government concluded that the asbestos may be harmful to the body, and took measures to ensure the safety of persons handling asbestos. Unfortunately, by this time, many thousands of people had their lives severely affected by asbestos-related lung cancer and other health problems. Asbestos is widely used in factories, homes and other places.
Asbestos causes problems such as scars on the lungs, lung cancer, asbestosis and pleural plaques. It also leads to a deadly, aggressive type of cancer called mesothelioma.
In contrast to conventional lung cancer, which affects the lung tissue of mesothelioma affects the lining around the lungs called the pleura. This type of cancer occurs almost exclusively in connection with exposure to asbestos.
Even a brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma. In addition, cancer can show a few decades after exposure to asbestos.
As with the majority of lung-related cancers, smoking greatly increases the chance of contracting mesothelioma. Some studies indicate that smokers, who had been exposed to asbestos is 50 to 90 times more likely to develop mesothelioma and other cancers of the lung, compared with a non-smoker with a similar exposure to asbestos. A non-smoker who is exposed to asbestos is about 5 times higher likelihood of developing mesothelioma, compared with people who have never been exposed to asbestos.
Early detection of lung cancer offers the greatest hope for survival.
Diagnostic methods for detection of asbestos-related lung cancer include the patient experiencing the history, as well as performing chest X-rays, MRI scan, scan CAT, tissue sampling and biopsy.
Prospects for those diagnosed with mesothelioma (and other types of lung cancer) is generally not encouraging. Multi-treatment methods used in some clinical trials was able to significantly increase life expectancy – one of the court has reached 40% survival at five years.
Treatment of mesothelioma are often combined chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. In many cases, however, the operation can be excluded because the cancer is diagnosed at a later stage. The first drug developed specifically for treatment of mesothelioma was Alimta, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2004. There is intense ongoing research to produce drugs for these aggressive asbestos-related cancer, and these efforts may eventually produce a reliable treatment.