How long does lung cancer lurk in the body before it breaks out?

How long does lung cancer remain dormant in the body before it breaks out? Lung cancer is a disease that can seriously affect the health of the elderly and may even take their lives. However, lung cancer is usually diagnosed in the latent period of lung cancer, so the elderly must pay a certain amount of attention to this disease.

Lung cancer can remain dormant in the human body for more than 20 years before suddenly developing into a malignant tumor that is difficult to treat. This finding highlights the need to develop methods to diagnose lung cancer early.

The study, which analyzed seven lung cancer patients, including smokers, ex-smokers and people who had never smoked, found that lung tumor cells caused by initial genetic errors can lurk in the human body for many years like seeds, quietly "growing" undetectable, and then be "triggered" by new genetic errors when conditions are ripe, "appearing" in the open and quickly growing into malignant tumors.

During the rapid growth phase of a tumor, multiple forms of genetic errors can occur in various areas of the tumor, causing each area to develop along different pathways, giving each part of the tumor its own genetic identity. Many targeted therapies have had limited success because they attack only specific genetic errors.

Lung cancer survival is woefully low, and many new targeted therapies have limited success. By understanding how lung cancer develops, we are opening up the evolutionary rule book for lung cancer, and hopefully we can begin to predict how it will develop next.

The study also showed that many of the early genetic errors associated with lung cancer are caused by smoking, but as the disease progresses, smoking becomes less important, with later genetic errors more often linked to a protein called APOBEC.

There are about 1.8 million new cases of lung cancer every year in the world, of which two-thirds are already in the advanced stage when diagnosed, and only about 10% of patients survive for more than 5 years after being diagnosed with lung cancer. The latest research suggests that if lung cancer can be detected early and nipped in the bud before it begins to develop along multiple evolutionary paths, the situation may be very different and more lung cancer patients will survive.

Although the elderly are a high-risk group for cancer, they should not be afraid of the disease. The chances of curing lung cancer are very high. The elderly should adopt appropriate methods, the first of which is prevention. Proper prevention can keep them away from lung cancer.