The death of ABC news anchor and longtime smoker Peter Jennings this week has drawn new media attention to an old and brutal killer - lung cancer.
"It's a very tough disease, really a collection of diseases ... and you don't want any of them," said Dr. Michael J. Thun, head of epidemiological research at the American Cancer Society.
Today it kills more people in the United States than any other form of cancer. On Monday, the day after Jennings' death, actress Barbara Bel Geddes, former star of the soap opera Dallas, died of lung cancer at 82.
The disease has been one of the hardest forms of cancer to cure, among the most difficult to survive and least likely to win public sympathy.
"There's a sense that patients gave it to themselves - they smoked," said Dr. David S. Ettinger, a professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
But that's not necessarily the case. On the day after Bel Geddes died, actress Dana Reeve, 44, widow of Superman star Christopher Reeve and a nonsmoker, announced that she, too, has the disease.
The American Cancer Society estimates that doctors will find lung cancer in more than 93,000 men and 79,560 women this year. Almost the same numbers - 90,490 men and 73,020 women- will die from it.
That's more deaths among men than the next four deadly cancers combined - prostate, colo-rectal and pancreatic cancers and leukemia. Among women, lung cancer kills more people than breast and colo-rectal cancers put together.
Cigarette smoking is by far the biggest risk factor in lung cancer, blamed for an estimated 80 percent of lung cancers in women and 90 percent in men, according to the American Cancer Society.
But it's not the only cause. Others include exposure to secondhand smoke, radon and asbestos. Genetic factors also contribute to the death toll, scientists say.
Lung cancer is notoriously difficult to beat, Ettinger said. With all stages and forms of the disease counted together, doctors are able to keep only 15 percent of lung cancer patients alive for five years.
"That's improving," Ettinger said. "If you diagnose it earlier, if you shift the curve to an earlier disease stage, you increase the cure rate, and I think we are heading in that direction."
With early detection, doctors can keep 60 percent to 70 percent of patients alive for five years. But that success rate falls to 2 percent in patients whose cancers are found at advanced stages - when they have spread to other parts of the body.
