The Spectrum

Issue date: 4/14/05 Section: Features

Media Credit: Contributed Photo Hundreds of thousands of Americans are diagnosed with lung cancer each year, with many of the cases resulting in death.

Along with ABC news anchor Peter Jennings who recently announced he has lung cancer, more than 170,000 cases of lung cancer are diagnosed within United States each year.
It is said that cancer develops in our cells, which are the body's basic unit of life. In order to comprehend lung cancer, it is useful to know how these normal cells become cancerous.
The human body is made up of all different types of cells. These cells grow, divide and produce more cells that are needed to keep us functioning day after day. Unfortunately, complications can arise.
Sometimes cells can keep dividing when new cells are not needed. Many times these new cells will develop a mass of extra cells, which is what we call a tumor.
The abnormal cells tend to grow when the lungs are exposed to cancer causing substances such as carcinogens. Carcinogens can be found in things such as cigarette smoke, asbestos, as well as silica dust.
As far as the symptoms go there are quite a few. A cough that does not go away and continues to get worse over time, constant chest pain, coughing up blood, shortness of breath, wheezing, problems with pneumonia or bronchitis, loss of appetite or weight loss, and swelling of the neck and face. The two main types of lung cancer are non-small cell lung cancer and small cell lung cancer.
So what exactly causes lung cancer?
Cigarettes are definitely one of the leading contributors. The likelihood that a smoker will develop lung cancer is affected by many different factors such as how old the person was when they started smoking, the number of cigarettes that person smoked per day, how deep they inhaled, and how long they've been smoking for.
"My grandmother died of emphysema when she was 57; my mother was only 23 when she died, so I never even got to meet her. It was not the way someone would want to die. She was only 88 lbs by the time she passed away and was usually 120, and looked like a skeleton. She smoked from her teenage years until she died. And people wonder why I'll never even consider touching a cigarette," said Andy Drost a junior from SUNY Albany.
Aside from cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and things like second hand smoke, there is always Radon, and Asbestos to consider, the two factors you probably weren't aware of.

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