Lung Cancer Facts Made Simple

Are you the kind who likes to take a lighthearted look at the serious issues of life? If that’s the case, you might like this book:

57 Good Things About Chemotherapy (Paperback)
Authors - Alec Kalla, Andy Williamson
ISBN: 0970914903

The whole purpose of this book is to help cancer patients laugh at cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy. How is that possible? Well, you’ve got to read the book to find out.

Keep in mind that gifting this book to a lung cancer patient involves quite a bit of risk. Why? Because the book makes fun of their situation in many ways. Life-threatening diseases are highly sensitive issues for many people and they may not like to have any aspect of their situation made fun of.

But if you are a cancer patient yourself and would like to explore the lighter side of the disease, do check this out. You do need a bit of a morbid sense of humor to digest this one, though. But in the end, humor is a matter of personal taste, not social dictum. So it’s really up to you.

If you haven’t already, check out these useful articles on the causes of lung cancer and the early symptoms of lung cancer for some must-have information.

Here’s another book worth reading for cancer patients and their families:

Eating Well Through Cancer: Easy Recipes & Recommendations During & After Treatment Authors - Holly Clegg, Gerald, M.D. Miletello
ISBN: 0961088877

Patients on cancer-treatment drugs often find that their appetite vanishes into thin air and their taste buds seem to have a mind of their own. If that’s you, you may find the recipes in this book very useful. The recipes themselves are mostly quite easy to make and use everyday food items readily available in your kitchen.

The authors have specific recipe recommendations depending on the kind of treatment you are taking. They also take into account side effects you may experience and suggest recipes accordingly.

For those whose treatments are over, the authors have helpful ideas on healthy eating to build up the body’s strength and resistance power.

Overall, an excellent, practical read for all cancer patients including those affected by lung cancer.

If the cancer is caused by overuse of alcohol or by smoking / other tobacco use, it can certainly be prevented. Most cases of lung cancer originate from tobacco use and so are preventable.

There are other factors that can cause cancer. Some of them include lack of exercise, obesity and poor nutrition. Obviously, these types of cancers can be prevented with the right lifestyle changes. At the very least, the chances of getting cancer from these causative factors can be minimized.

Prolonged exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays can contribute to skin cancer. The incidence of this type of cancer could be significantly reduced by regulating exposure to the sun and also by avoiding practices like indoor tanning.

So yes, certain types of cancers can be prevented.

Given the generally high mortality rates from cancer, just how much is spent on cancer research every year?

It is somewhat difficult to give exact figures, but some rough estimates are possible. It is known that the US Federal Government spends over $1 billion per annum on funding research for breast cancer alone. The Federal Government is the single largest spender on this category of research.

There are estimates that the total annual spend on cancer research is between $6 and 7 billion per annum, conservatively. That is in the United States alone. There appear to be no reliable estimates available for worldwide cancer research funding figures - although many other countries, private foundations and corporations fund cancer research, figures are not readily available in many cases.

As far as cancer incidence goes, it is estimated that approximately 10.8 million people in the US either have or have had cancer as of 2004. That is, in 2004, there were 10.8 million people alive in America who have either a past or present history of some kind of cancer.

And in 2008. an estimated 1.44 million new cancer cases were expected to be diagnosed in the United States.

Speaking of how much is spent on cancer research, just what is the money spent on? Cancer research involves a wide variety of activities. One example is molecular bioscience, also called bench research. Epidemiology and clinical trials are two other types of research activities. Clinical trials are conducted to measure the effectiveness or otherwise of various types of cancer treatments under development.

Chemotherapy, surgery, hormone therapy, radiation treatment, etc are various types of applications tested out in clinical trials for cancer research.

In recent years, biotechnology research has produced applications in gene therapy and immunotherapy, which are also evaluated through clinical trials.

Considerable research efforts are focused on what is called oncogenomics, which seeks to identify genes that cause cancer as well as those that inhibit cancerous growths. New types of therapies result from this type of research. Such efforts can also help predict the probable outcome of specific kinds of cancers.

Despite how much is spent on cancer research, the incidence and death rates from cancer continue to remain high. Research efforts may well need to be stepped up to a new level to contain the fatalities from this group of killer diseases.