Following the excellent podcast by Dr. Rogerio Lilenbaum, lung cancer expert and now Chair of Cleveland Clinic Florida in Weston, on Considerations and Challenges of Treating Elderly Patients with Lung Cancer, he fielded questions from me and the folks in the live audience who attended. Here's that question and answer session, provided in audio and with the associated transcript. There isn't really any video/figures for this one.

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Here's the presentation by my friend and colleague Dr. Rogerio Lilenbaum, a great medical oncologist now serving as Director of Hematology/Oncology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in South Florida (Weston, FL).

Introduction

With the median age of patients now being diagnosed with lung cancer in the US a little over 70, the question of how best to manage elderly patients with lung cancer is a very relevant but also understudied question.

The rate of our progress in lung cancer and other settings in medicine reaches a bottleneck in the slow rate at which clinical trials are completed. Nevertheless, only about 3% of patients with cancer in the US participate in clinical trials, and the number is even a little lower for people with lung cancer.

Occasionally at meetings, oncologists are confronted with a marketing study done by the pharmaceutical industry that reveals that something like half of patients diagnosed with lung cancer never receive any treatment.

Although the ASCO Plenary session presentation on ALK inhibition with crizotinib was a darling of the entire conference and led to a post I wrote about on the way back from the meeting, there was actually a second presentation on lung cancer in t

The initial or "first line" management of advanced NSCLC has evolved quite a bit over the past 10 years, in that time moving from a much more uniform approach of very similar treatment for just about everyone to a revised approach that is far more individualized. First, we assess key issues like the subtype of NSCLC, focusing largely on whether it is squamous cell or non-squamous NSCLC, because treatment tends to diverge very early based on this factor.

It's been a few months since I sat down with my friend, Dr. Nasser Hanna, a great lung cancer expert from Indiana University, and also a friend in the field. Those of you who have been following GRACE content for a while may have come across his name: he's led a few of the more important trials that are part of our current core knowledge in lung cancer now, such as the

The last of our three cases reviewing management issues in elderly and frail patients with lung cancer, as covered in a recent webinar discussion I had with experts Paul J. Hesketh from Lahey Clinic and Karen Kelly from Kansas University Medical Center, focuses on treatment of advanced/metastatic NSCLC. Drs.