Cancer and Healthy

The link between asbestos and lung cancer is well established today. However, this was not always the case. For many decades, asbestos was regarded as a miracle mineral. It is an excellent insulator and this was one of its major applications. Asbestos was also included in a wide range of products manufactured.

Suspicions that exposure to asbestos can cause serious health problems existed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It is thought that those who are interested in promoting the consumption of asbestos acted to discredit such reports.

In 1931, the British government had concluded that asbestos was potentially harmful to the body and measures taken to ensure the safety of this treatment asbestos. The U.S. government undertook similar actions during the 1970s.

Unfortunately, by that time, many thousands of people had their lives seriously affected by asbestos-related lung cancer and other health problems. Asbestos was widely used in factories, homes and elsewhere.

Asbestos causes problems such as scarring in the lungs, lung cancer, asbestosis and pleural plaques. It also leads to a fatal, aggressive form of cancer called mesothelioma.

Unlike normal lung cancer affecting the tissues of the lung itself, mesothelioma affects the lining around the lungs called the pleura. This type of cancer occurs almost exclusively due to exposure to asbestos.

Even a brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma. Furthermore, the cancer can demonstrate several decades after exposure to asbestos.

As with most-related lung cancer, smoking increases the chances of contracting mesothelioma significant. Some studies show that a smoker who is exposed to asbestos have 50 to 90 times the risk of developing mesothelioma and other forms of cancer of the lungs, compared with a non-smoker with similar exposure to asbestos. A non-smoker who is exposed to asbestos has about 5 times higher chance of developing mesothelioma in comparison with people who have never been exposed to asbestos.

If you have had any exposure to asbestos, either at work or elsewhere, you must regularly screening for any abnormalities in the lungs. And this must continue, because lung cancer may show up as late as 50 years after exposure to asbestos. Early diagnosis of lung cancer offers the best hope for survival.

Diagnostic methods for detection of asbestos-related lung disease even by a patient's medical history in addition to his participation as a performer chest X-rays, MRI scans, CAT scans, sampling and tissue biopsy.

The outlook for the diagnosis mesothelioma (and other types of lung cancers) are generally not encouraging. In some cases, life expectancy for someone diagnosed with mesothelioma can be as little as 2-3 months. Multi-treatment methods used in a number of clinical studies have succeeded in a significant increase in life - such a test achieved a 40% survival five years.

The treatment of mesothelioma often combined with chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. In many cases, however, surgery may be excluded because the cancer is diagnosed at a late stage. There are new chemotherapy treatments available that seem promising.

The first drug specifically developed for the treatment of mesothelioma was Alimta, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2004. When Alimta is used in combination with cisplatin, a drug that is also used for cancer patients was found to increase life expectancy. There is intensive research to a cure for this aggressive asbestos-related cancer and these efforts may ultimately be a reliable cure.