Bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) is an unusual subtype of lung cancer; medical oncologist Dr. Jack West reviews the evidence on the best systemic therapy to treat advanced, multifocal BAC.
Transcript
It's not uncommon for a question here to be about the a pathologist's terminology on a report that equivocates about whether a lesion is bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) or another form of adenocarcinoma, perhaps "well-differentiated adenocarcinoma", especially if it has a radiographic appearance of a hazy infiltrate or many small ground glass opacities.
This month's Journal of Thoracic Oncology includes a landmark article, written by a multidisciplinary group of lung cancer experts that features several of the leading lung cancer pathologists in the world, that is attempting to do no less than present a new categorization of the pathology of lung cancer, focusing primarily on adenocarcinomas, but also touching on other lung cancer subgroups.
Bronchioloalveolar carcinoma, or BAC, is a unique subtype of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that has unique features in terms of the demographics of who gets it, how it appears on scans, how it often behaves, and potentially in how it responds to treatment. It is a subset of lung cancer for which most of what we know emerged in the last 10 years, with our understanding of this entity, and even the definition of BAC, still evolving. What is BAC? BAC was first identified and defined as a separate subtype of lung cancer by Dr.
In one of my earliest posts about bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC) (in the dark ages, pre-Twitter), I wrote on the subject of managing small BAC-type lesions, which tend to appear as small hazy areas called "ground glass opacities" (GGOs) and suggested that some of these cancers may be so indolent that they don't need to be treated, even if they have the word "carcinoma" in the diagnosis.
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