This helps seal the space and keep fluid from building up again. Most of the time, non-small cell lung cancer is treated with surgery and radiation. Chemo might be also be added. Any type of surgery can have some risks and side effects. Be sure to ask the doctor what you can expect. If you have problems, let your doctor know. Doctors who treat people with lung cancer should be able to help you with any problems that come up. Radiation uses high-energy rays like x-rays to kill cancer cells.
It can be given alone or along with chemo. Radiation can also be used to relieve symptoms such as pain, bleeding, trouble swallowing, or other problems that happen when the lung cancer has grown very large or has spread to other areas like the bones.
If your doctor suggests radiation as your treatment, talk about what side effects might happen. The most common side effects of radiation are:. Most side effects get better after treatment ends. Some might last longer. Talk to your cancer care team about what you can expect. Chemo — the short word for chemotherapy — is the use of drugs to fight cancer. The drugs may be given into a vein or taken as pills. These drugs go into the blood and spread through the body.
Chemo is often given to treat for non-small cell lung cancer. Chemo is given in cycles or rounds. Each round of treatment is followed by a break. This gives the body time to recover. Most of the time, 2 or more chemo drugs are given.
Treatment often lasts for many months. Chemo can make you feel very tired, sick to your stomach, and cause your hair to fall out. But these problems go away after treatment ends. There are ways to treat most chemo side effects. If you have side effects, be sure to talk to your cancer care team so they can help.
Targeted therapy drugs may be used for lung cancers that have certain abnormal proteins. These drugs affect mainly cancer cells and not normal cells in the body. They may cause different side effects than chemo. Immunotherapy is treatment that either boosts your own immune system or uses man-made versions of parts of the immune system that attack the lung cancer cells.
Many types of immunotherapy are used to treat lung cancer. These drugs may be given into a vein. Immunotherapy can cause many different side effects depending on which drug is used. These drugs may make you feel tired, sick to your stomach, or cause a rash. The most frequent metastatic sites are:. Lung cancers most typically spread to other parts of the body through the lymph vessels and blood vessels. However, once it does, it spreads relatively quickly. Generally speaking, metastasis through the blood cells is worse in the short term, and metastasis through lymph cells is worse in the long term.
While sex, ethnicity, and age can affect survival, the life expectancy after a diagnosis of brain metastases from lung cancer is generally poor. Without treatment, the average survival rate is under 6 months. With treatment, that number can increase slightly. Usually those who develop brain metastases farther out from diagnosis have a slightly higher survival rate than those whose lung cancer metastasizes to the brain earlier.
The difference, however, is usually small. When it comes to treatment of lung cancer brain metastases, the available options depend on several different factors, such as:.
Treatment for metastatic brain cancer is dependent on the original type of lung cancer. Your doctor may recommend whole brain radiation if there are several tumors present. It can also follow surgery in some cases. This treatment is a high-dose radiation therapy that targets a specific part of the brain and is usually used in patients with fewer tumors. But my hope is that if we have a better understanding of how they form, we can prevent them from growing in the brain in the first place.
This article is part of Nature Outlook: Lung cancer , an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties.
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Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF. Credit: Daniel Stolle. Nicotine plays a dirty trick Cancer biologist Kounosuke Watabe at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, thinks that metastatic brain tumours in lung cancer can be linked to whatever causes the disease in the first place, which for most patients is smoking.
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