Postgraduate Medicine Editor's Mail - Some Observations on Lung Cancer

Our plain-English summary of Postgraduate Medicine Editor's Mail - Some Observations on Lung Cancer, by A. Ochsner.

The study

• Author: A. Ochsner
• Published: Postgraduate Medicine
• Type of article: Letter
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This was a letter to the editor, not a research study, in which the author shared observations on lung cancer after reading a symposium on the subject. The text available here does not mention asbestos. The author quoted the symposium's introduction as saying lung cancer is related to both tobacco smoking and inhaled air pollutants. The author called tobacco smoke the worst type of air pollution because of how concentrated it is. The author wrote that lung cancer results were no better than 40 years earlier, and that by the time of diagnosis it is usually too late because the cancer invades blood vessels. The letter described blood tests done earlier by two other investigators at the Ochsner Clinic. They looked for tumor cells in the arterial blood of patients having lung function tests. No tumor cells were found in patients without cancer. For patients with lung cancer, the scan shows the figure as 40 followed by garbled characters, possibly 40 percent, but the exact number cannot be confirmed. The author wrote that this finding had not stopped operations when there was no definite evidence of distant spread.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Letter to the editor (personal observations and commentary on a lung cancer symposium); not an original study
• Who was studied: In a blood-testing study by two other Ochsner Clinic investigators (Dr Hurst Hatch and Dr Guillermo Carrera), patients undergoing pulmonary function tests were examined. Some had cancer and some did not. The total is printed illegibly as "80O" in the scan, and the split between the groups is also garbled.
• Exposure: The letter discusses tobacco smoking and inhaled air pollutants as causes of lung cancer. Asbestos is not mentioned in the readable text.
• Main results:
  • In the Ochsner Clinic blood study, tumor cells were not found in the peripheral arterial blood of patients without cancer (no false positives).
  • Tumor cells were found in some patients with lung cancer. The scan prints the figure as 40 followed by garbled characters, possibly 40 percent. The exact figure and the number of lung cancer patients tested cannot be confirmed from the text.
  • The author stated that lung cancer results were no better than they had been 40 years earlier.
  • The author compared pollutant particles in smoke from a nonfiltered cigarette (figure garbled in the scan) with 100,000 per cubic millimeter in the air of the most polluted urban areas.
  • The author wrote that finding tumor cells in arterial blood had not stopped them from operating when there was no definite evidence of distant metastasis, because blood destroys tumor cells in many instances.
• The authors' conclusion: The author's view was that by the time lung cancer is diagnosed it is usually too late, because of its tendency to invade blood vessels. The author also appears to state that most lung cancer is preventable, apart from about 5% or 10% of cases, but the start of that sentence is lost.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Lung Cancer.

Browse return to medical research.