Understand your options

Surgery

If surgery is the treatment of choice, a surgeon will evaluate your lungs to determine the best way to remove a cancerous tumor(s).

In general, surgeons try to remove as little lung as needed to eliminate the cancer. However, removal of the lymph nodes draining the tumor helps reduce the chance of the cancer coming back and provides better tumor staging.

Learn more about surgical procedures

Chemotherapy1

Chemotherapy is a form of drug treatment. It can be in pill form or injected into a vein or muscle.

Chemotherapy is considered a systemic therapy. That means the drug enters the bloodstream and circulates throughout your body to reach and destroy cancer cells in the lungs and beyond. It’s an effective way to destroy cancer cells that break away from the main tumor and travel in the bloodstream to lymph nodes or other organs.

Radiation2

In radiation therapy, high-energy rays destroy cancer cells.

Advances in radiation treatment, now allow concentration of the radiation beams on the tumor to minimize the damage to the surrounding tissue. In addition, it may be used to kill any cancer cells that remain in the lung area after surgery or chemotherapy. Radioactive iodine is not usually used for the treatment of lung cancer.

According to the National Cancer Institute, “About half of all cancer patients receive some type of radiation therapy sometime during the course of their treatment.”
Other treatment options exist. Your oncologist and surgeon will discuss these different options with you and explain the goal of each.

References

  1. Chemotherapy for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. American Cancer Society website. Accessed September 27, 2016.
  2. Radiation for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. American Cancer Society website. Accessed September 27, 2016.