Can I be cured of lung cancer?

Can I be cured of lung cancer?

Lung cancer is a very aggressive malignancy. We don't often use the term "cure" because recurrence rates and new lung cancer primaries are high, relatively. After undergoing full treatment for your lung cancer, including surgery where we've removed the lung cancer, and if there's radiographically, and by blood tests and the rest of your workup, there's no evidence of a cancer, you're really in remission. Those patients that have no evidence of disease by our current standards still have about a thirty per cent chance of getting a recurrence. About ten per cent of the time this can be a local recurrence, where the cancer was previously. The other remaining twenty per cent of the time, it can occur in distant sites, elsewhere in your body. And secondly, lung cancer can occur in other sites elsewhere in your lung. This is often what we call a "second lung cancer primary." So, this has really no relation to your previous lung cancer, but because whatever carcinogen or risk factors that you had previously has also impacted on other areas of your lung, so as a result you're at risk of getting another lung cancer.