smoke.
Causes of lung cancer
• Smoking cigarettes is the main cause of lung cancer. Before people began smoking lung cancer was a rare disease.• Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals. Some of these chemicals cause cancer (are carcinogenic). For example, acetone (paint stripper), ammonia (toilet cleaner), cyanide (rat Killer), DDT (insecticide), and carbon monoxide (car exhaust fumes).
• Each time a smoker inhales, these chemicals touch the cells inside the passages leading to the lungs and in the lungs (the bronchus-windpipe, bronchioles-smaller air passages and alveoli-air sacs). This happens hundreds of times a day for many
years.
• The poisons cause many cells to change (mutate). The body’s defence cells destroy these changed cells. But sooner or later one of the mutated cells survives.
• It then divides to produce more mutated cells. These keep on dividing and eventually form a cancer. This grows until the lung can’t function and the person dies.
• Sometimes the cancer also spreads to other parts of the body causing more cancers (secondary cancer).
Treatment
• If the cancer hasn’t spread, the person can have surgery to remove it.• Sometimes the patient has x-ray treatment (radiotherapy). This helps control pain and other symptoms. Treatment with drugs (chemotherapy) is often used for small cell lung cancer.
(published with permission in writing from:http://www.ash.org.nz/)
