Is small cell lung cancer serious?

Small cell lung cancer often occurs in the bronchi, causing respiratory disorders. As the current living environment is seriously polluted and the pathogenic factors in the air increase, travel is inconvenienced. Let us now understand whether small cell lung cancer is serious.

Is small cell lung cancer serious? The answer is yes, but the patient may not feel any discomfort. From this perspective, it is not as serious as patients in critical condition. The seriousness we are talking about here means that if you get lung cancer and do not receive active treatment, your survival period will not be long, so lung cancer is very serious. In fact, some questions are difficult for doctors to answer, because to determine whether lung cancer is in the early or late stages, it is necessary to combine the results of pathological examination and the results of relevant regional lymph node examination.

Small cell lung cancer is one of the basic types of lung cancer. It belongs to undifferentiated cancer. Its pathological types include oat cell type, intermediate cell type and compound oat cell type. One third of lung cancer patients belong to this type. Small cell lung cancer is a highly malignant tumor with poor biological behavior and a poor prognosis. Compared with other types of lung cancer with the same spread range, small cell lung cancer has a shorter symptom period before diagnosis and a shorter survival period after diagnosis. If not treated, the median survival time of patients with small cell lung cancer from diagnosis is less than three months, and the two-year survival rate is less than 1%. The age of onset is relatively young, more common in men, and most patients have a history of smoking. It usually originates from larger bronchi, and most of them are central lung cancer. Small cell carcinoma has a low degree of differentiation, grows fast, and has early lymphatic metastasis and invasion of blood vessels through the blood vessels to widely metastasize to distant organs and tissues of the body. Therefore, among all types of lung cancer, small cell carcinoma has the worst prognosis. Small cell carcinoma is highly sensitive to radiotherapy or anticancer drug treatment. Surgery is generally not advocated for treatment, and systemic chemotherapy and radiotherapy are the main treatments. This type of lung cancer has a high degree of malignancy and a poor prognosis. Fever and cough are common symptoms of lung cancer. Headache should alert patients to brain metastasis. A cranial CT scan is strongly recommended.