Been found, a New Technique for the Treatment of Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is one type of cancer is difficult to cure. Now a new simple technique may help improve diagnosis and treatment options for patients with lung cancer.

This technique involves counting the number of tumor cells in blood samples taken before and after the patient has chemotherapy.

With this technique allows the doctor to find out how well the patient's response to the treatment given.

It also reflects an increase in determining the diagnostic tests that are currently still in the form of invasive and can only be performed once.

During this time to determine the diagnosis of lung cancer through a procedure called a bronchoscopy, which is taking tissue samples from the airways using a needle.

"Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer in the UK and we urgently need new treatments for this disease," said Dr Lesley Walker, director of information from Cancer Research UK,

Dr Walker said a new and exciting things of this technique is that it can detect and count tumor cells that circulate through the blood so that shows there is progress in the treatment of this disease.

In a new report published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers explain how studying the amount of circulating tumor cells (circulating tumor cells / CTCs) in 101 lung cancer patients before and after one cycle of chemotherapy.

The research team believes that by counting CTCs so doctors can monitor how well patients respond to chemotherapy are done. If the known number of cells increases it will be given different treatments that might respond better.

"This research suggests new ways to monitor how the response of treatment and determining how aggressive it is. Now we need to test it on a large scale and if it is confirmed the results it could be a potential care and treatment of disease by adjusting the patient's condition," said Dr. Fiona Blackhall, study author and lung cancer doctor at the Christie cancer Centre, Manchester.

Expected to develop this simple technique could be a future breakthrough in understanding how the disease develops lung cancer, this is because it involves the number of tumor cells in the patient's body.