Question: Is lung cancer a cancer that kills quickly or slowly? Also what treatment is used at the minute to kill or hurt it?

Alex Haragan answered on 12 Jun 2018:

Its always important to remember that “cancer” is a really broad term that describes hundreds of different types, and even within lung cancer there are at least dozens of different kinds of cancer. I would argue there are actually hundreds if you define them by specific behaviours.
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As a result – some are more aggressive than others. One big issue with lung cancer is that it often presents late. By that I mean by the time someone comes to see a doctor the lung cancer can already be quite advanced.
So some kinds of aggressive lung cancer will on average kill in a few months, and some less aggressive cancers, if caught early, will take much longer, often years.
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Compared to other cancers lung is one of the worst – it is the 3rd most common cancer (after breast and prostate) but easily kills more people than any other kind of cancer.
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Saying that – we are seeing big improvements in the last couple of years. From say 1970s to 2010 we didn’t see much change. But in the last few years we have seen lots of new drugs being developed.
We still use traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and there will always be a role for surgery, but we now have targeted drugs that inhibit specific processes within cancer cells, and my area of work looks at drugs that get the immune system to kill the cancer.
Not often, but occasionally, we see people with really advanced, really aggressive lung cancer walking away cancer-free because of these drugs!
Exciting times!