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.
Dr. Jack West, medical oncologist/lung cancer specialist, describes special management considerations for indolent lung cancers that may not require treatment or are at risk for “over-treatment.”
Transcript
For all too many people with lung cancer or caring for someone with it, the concept that lung cancer may not be threatening may seem sacrilegious. It is, after all, by far the leading cause of cancer deaths in the US in both men and women, far ahead of both breast cancer and prostate cancer in its fatality rate, though breast cancers and prostate cancers are more commonly diagnosed in women and men respectively. Yes, lung cancer is far more deadly than those two cancers, but both breast and prostate cancer are diagnosed in tens of thousands of people who aren't truly threatened by it.
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.
Only a few years ago, oncologists saw lung cancer as divisible into small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), with very little relevance to any division beyond that point.
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