Lung cancer is spreading rapidly , Medanta doctors warn [TKB Health]

The number of people who die of lung cancer is the highest in the world including India. Lung cancer is a very dangerous disease. Compared to different types of cancer, most of the patients die in lung cancer. Despite the progress in treatment in the last few years, there has been a slight decrease in the number of people who died from this disease. According to the Global Cancer Observatory (Globocan) 2020, an organization that collects data on cancer cases and deaths internationally, lung cancer is currently responsible for the largest number of deaths from this disease in India.

Gurugram’s Medanta Hospital has started the hashtag Beat Lung Cancer campaign. In this, the country’s renowned lung surgeon Dr. Arvind Kumar and his team shared their analysis done on more than 300 lung cancer patients during a decade.

How research was done
In the research conducted by this team under the leadership of Dr. Arvind Kumar, they found that an increasing number of patients coming to the outpatient clinic were non-smokers of a relatively younger age group. For this result, patients who came to the hospital for treatment between March 2012 and November 2022 were analyzed. During this, aspects of lifestyle and living conditions of the patients were also assessed.

Doctors got shocking results in 10 years of research

Doctors found during the research that there was an overall increase in lung cancer in both men and women. In terms of prevalence and mortality among men, this disease was already at number one. Whereas, in women it has gone up from number 7 (as per Globocan 2012) to number 3 (as per Globocan 2020) in a span of eight years. In the research, the age of about 20 percent of the victims was found to be less than 50 years. Lung cancer developed among the people of India almost a decade earlier than in the western countries. About 10 percent of all patients were under the age of 40. And 2.6 percent were around 20 years old.

The surprising thing was that about 50 percent of these patients were non-smokers (non-smokers). In these too, 70 percent of the patients were below the age of 50 years. At the same time, 100 percent of patients under the age of 30 were non-smokers.

An increase in the number of female patients was also observed in cases of lung cancer. Which was 30 percent of the total patients. All these women were non smokers. According to Globocan 2012, till earlier this figure was very less in the past.

During this, it was also seen that the disease of more than 80 percent patients was detected in advanced stage, when complete treatment could not be done on the patients. Here only they could be given relief from pain.

In about 30 percent of the cases, the disease of the patient was misdiagnosed and was considered as TB disease. Mistaking it for TB, he was treated for several months, due to which the treatment of the real disease got delayed.

Doctor suggested this
This study suggests that there may be an increase in lung cancer among younger non-smoker women in the coming decade. This risk is significantly different from the group of older men who used tobacco. These results also show that most of the cases are detected late due to lack of adequate treatment, resulting in high mortality rate. In the near future, lung cancer can wreak havoc like an epidemic.

It has also been found in this research that for the adequate management of this disease, there is a need for specialized thoracic surgical centers equipped with the latest technology including key-hole surgery (VAT and robotic surgery) in the country. There are very few centers in India that provide such treatment. These figures show the lack of arrangements in India to deal with this disease.

There is an urgent need to raise awareness about the risk of lung cancer among various sections of the society so that necessary action can be taken at every level to combat this disease.