Tuesday, November 8, 2011

From Thorax: Therapeutic advances in lung cancer

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22058187

Thorax. 2011 Nov 5. [Epub ahead of print]
Therapeutic advances in non-small cell lung cancer.
Vallières E, Peters S, Van Houtte P, Dalal P, Lim E.
Source
Department of Thoracic Surgery, Swedish Cancer Institute, Seattle, Washington, USA.

Abstract
Despite decades of research, therapeutic advances in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have progressed at a painstaking slow rate with few improvements in standard surgical resection for early stage disease and chemotherapy or radiotherapy for patients with advanced disease. In the past 18 months, however, we seemed to have reached an inflexion point: therapeutic advances that are centred on improvements in the understanding of patient selection, surgery that is undertaken through smaller incisions, identification of candidate mutations accompanied by the development of targeted anticancer treatments with a focus on personalised medicine, improvements to radiotherapy technology, emergence of radiofrequency ablation (RFA), and last but by no means least, the recognition of palliative care as a therapeutic modality in its own right. The contributors to this review are a distinguished international panel of experts who highlight recent advances in each of the major disciplines.

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