We're heading into the season where much of the biggest news in the cancer world for the year is about to be released, in press releases and full presentations at our annual conference of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

Here's the final piece of the webinar with our own Dr. Jared Weiss on Highlights in Lung Cancer from 2011 -- the question and answer session that followed his presentation.  Below is the transcript, figures, and the audio and video versions of the podcast.

This is the third and final part of Dr. Weiss's presentation on "Highlights in Lung Cancer, 2011".  After focusing on developments in relatively narrow subpopulations with distinct molecular markers in the first two parts of his webinar, Dr.

Introduction

The medical literature tells us that one of the most stressful times of a patients' cancer course is the time between discovering that they may have cancer and beginning their treatment. So much is new and unknown. For many patients, this is their first exposure to the health care system. The patient often requires multiple tests and need to consult with different physician specialties, sometimes in different hospitals before treatment can begin. It can be a time where well meaning family and friends provide advice and anecdotes from their experiences with cancer.

The GRACE Lung Cancer Reference Library is made possible by an educational grant from Pfizer, who had no input in its contents.

What is cancer?

We all know now that lung cancer, and in particular NSCLC, sits atop the list of cancer killers in the United States and western world. We also have been having extensive discussions on this site about all these great new treatment modalities: better staging (i.e. PET), better surgeries (i.e. VATS), radiosurgery (i.e. gamma knife), better radiation (i.e. IMRT), and better chemotherapy or targeted agents.

Erlotinib (Tarceva) was approved for treatment of progressive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) after the BR21 study that showed that tarceva not only improved survival but also improved lung cancer symptoms and quality of life. This study and others have also taught us that the benefit of tarceva is much better in those who had never smoked and less effective in current smokers.

One of the most common questions I am asked by newly diagnosed lung cancer patients is “What can I, personally, do to help fight my cancer?” The two most common topics are diet and exercise. While the influence of diet on cancer outcomes is a good topic for discussion, today I wanted to focus on the question of exercise in cancer patients, and whether exercise may help people with lung cancer either live longer or at least have a better quality of life.