Look Who it Was Random video

New Way of Looking at Lung Cancer

76 views · Published 28 December 2015 · 1:51 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: Lee Health · 2015 · Science & Technology

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Over the past two decades doctors started noticing a trend in lung cancer: Patients coming to them who did not fall into a high-risk category.

“We see now more women, more younger people, and more non-smokers,” says Dr. Lowell Hart, an oncologist on medical staff of Lee Memorial Health System. 

Lung cancer is usually linked with smoking. While it is still the top driver, experts can’t help but notice when 16-20 thousand people die of this disease each year who didn’t smoke. If non-smoking lung cancer had a separate category, it would rank among the top ten fatal cancers. This has ignited research to find out why.

“For the patients that haven’t been smokers, they more often will have a driver mutation. One gene goes bad in the lung tissue and drives the cancer,” says Dr. Hart. 

The presence of a mutation driving many of these non-smoking lung cancer cases is leading to new research, new drug therapies and new success. Experts divide it into two distinct plans of attack, sometimes using both to their advantage.

“The exciting research in lung cancer is two aspects: one, getting the targeted treatment so that we can just hit that bad gene pathway. The other thing that there’s a lot of exciting research now is revving up your immune system to be able to recognize the cancer as abnormal and sort of reject the cancer,” says Dr. Hart. 

Patients with non-smoking lung cancer have a better survival rate than patients who smoked. Likely due to not having other conditions associated with tobacco, as well the array of new drug treatments. Adding up to a new way of looking at lung cancer.

“I think that we hopefully turn it into more of a chronic illness where the patient is going to live years and not months like it was back 20 years ago,” says Dr. Hart. 


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Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of medical care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For nearly a century, we’ve been providing our community with everything from primary care treatment to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.

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