I'm Dr. Adam Zora,
a pulmonologist and critical care
physician with Mayo Clinic Health System.
And I'm here to answer
some questions about lung cancer.
Unfortunately, with lung cancer,
symptoms are cough is
a very common but very nonspecific symptoms.
So not everybody who coughs
has a cancer, right?
So you really can't
base a lot of stuff on that.
And a small nodule
at a point where we can still
cure this cancer when it's
a small nodule about half an inch or less,
let's say you're not going to feel
that one that is a silently groin.
So this is why it's
important to do lung screening,
the definition of screenings that were taken,
somebody who doesn't have symptoms,
but they're at high risk.
And we're checking to see
if they have potentially
an early detectable cancer
that is not symptomatic but yet can be cured.
The same idea as a mammogram.
Not everybody feels a lump in their breast,
but we're doing
mammograms at irregular intervals.
So then we can catch those lumps
before they even palpable, right?
The whole point is to catch it
early before it becomes obvious.
And it's the same with lung screening.
We wanna do your lung screening
low-dose CT scan every year.
So we can catch this early nodule
at a point where we can say we can cure
it rather than wait until
you now have weight-loss and
coughing up blood and
all the other symptoms that
are associated with late cancer,
at which point, cure
is probably not going to happen.
And treatment is limited
in what it can offer.
The key, don't smoke to begin with,
but also detection early.
So if you're a smoker
and you meet the criteria,
lung screening with a low dose CT scan
is currently what we're recommending.
We can think of a lung nodule as a spot.
We do a CT scan or a chest X-ray and we
see a spot on your CT scan.
Just looking at it doesn't
tell us if it's cancer or not.
There are things that make
us think it's cancer and there are
calculators that we can look at and say,
well, the percentage of this
being a cancer is high.
E.g. the bigger it is, the older you are.
If you're a smoker,
if you're male,
depending on the position it's in,
all of these things can tell us,
oh yeah, this is likely a cancer,
but it doesn't tell us it's
a cancer until we take a piece of it.
We don't know for sure.
Now, a fungal infection can also
cause a lung nodule
in the midwest, Wisconsin.
One of the Communists reasons for small,
tiny lung nodules is
actually previous exposure to histoplasma,
which is a fungus in the soil.
It's all around us. You walk in the woods,
you dig in your backyard, you come across it.
And our own body is
very capable of taking care of it.
So basically it finds
these little organisms and walls them off.
And that's what becomes a little
nodule on a CT scan.
But we can just tell that by looking at it.
So often when we find an arginine,
we kinda go into
what is the likelihood that it's a cancer.
If it's really a very small likelihood,
then we're not going to subject
you to invasive tests.
We're just going to follow it.
But if it's pretty likely,
then we are going
after it to try and prove it,
or potentially even just with lung cancer.
And the reason that we
try and push lung screening,
you might go to your primary provider
or to your pulmonologist.
And we talked to you about on screening,
having a low dose CT scan,
low dose radiation CT
scan on a yearly basis similar to mammogram,
people are familiar with the
idea of a mammogram.
And the whole idea there is that we
want to detect these spots,
are these nodules when they're really small.
So we something, if we see
something that is small
and likely to be a cancer,
we want to be able to prove it,
take it out, treated
at a point where we can cure it.
And if we can take
a very early stage lung cancer,
cure can reach close to
100% If we get it earlier.
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