Question: what type of treatment do people get for lung cancer

Leila Nichol answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Lung tumours can be treated with surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy. This depends on the type of tumour, what stage it’s at, where it is, whether it has spread.. lots of factors go into deciding the treatment.

In radiotherapy, lung tumours can be challenging because they tend to move when we breathe. This means we need sophisticated ways of locating the exact position of the tumour at time of treatment. This can involve on-treatment kind of CT scan before and after treatment.

Particularly for lung tumours we have a new type of radiotherapy called Stereotactic Radiosurgery, where very fine beams are delivering radiation dose at very high rates to the small tumour area.

As with any tumour though, the earlier it’s caught, the better chance of successful treatment.