As we honor lung cancer awareness month, what do you want our patients and families to pause and remember?
It is so important to know that lung cancer can strike anyone with lungs. Yes, there are some risk factors that make lung cancer more likely, but no one deserves to get lung cancer and everyone deserves to have treatment options that align with their goals and values.
Screening for lung cancer saves lives. Patients 50 years and older with at least 20 pack-year cigarette smoking history (equivalent of 1 pack per day for 20 years) benefit from low-dose CT scans annually. Treatments have been improving so much in terms of both effectiveness and safety, and so the earlier we catch a lung tumor, the more easily we can treat it with as few side effects as possible.
Many people can be cured of lung cancer, others can have their lives extended much longer than ever before, and still others who may not live for very long have options to feel better and have a better quality-of-life for whatever time they do have left.
What inspired you to become a radiation oncologist and how do you typically approach patients that may be nervous about receiving therapy?
I was inspired to become a radiation oncologist when I saw how technology, biology, and humanism could blend so well. We often have challenging conversations with our patients where we delve into their deepest concerns and hopes. We use this information to guide us in how we use our powerful modality of radiation therapy to create individualized and customized plans that achieve the optimal balance of effectiveness and side effects for each patient. I also love working in close-knit multidisciplinary teams, as I learn so much from my frequent discussions with surgeons, medical oncologists, pulmonologists, primary care physicians, diagnostic and interventional radiologists, and pathologists.
Can you talk about recent advances in radiotherapy technology such as RefleXion X1 and what this means for patients?
Radiotherapy continues to improve at an astonishing rate. Stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) has revolutionized the treatment of lung cancer, using information from 4-dimensional CT scans to account for how tumors move as we breathe. We are now able to cure many more people with higher-dose treatments to smaller fields that minimize the side effects. The RefleXion X1, which uses PET signal emitted by the tumor to guide the radiation delivery, has the potential of helping us make our treatment fields even smaller and making high-dose radiation even safer. Yale will be the 5th center in the world and 1st on the east coast to offer this novel approach once installation is complete in December 2023. Incorporating these technological advances with improving systemic therapy has made the impossible now possible.
What role have clinical trials played in the advancement of care for patients with lung cancer?
Clinical trials have been critically important to nearly all the advances that we have made in lung cancer. All of our current standards were at some point experimental. The courageous patients who were willing to put their trust in innovative physicians to enroll on clinical trials are entirely the reason that people with lung cancer live so much longer and better than they used to. There is immense regulatory oversight over clinical trials to ensure that there is a biologic basis in testing a new treatment (or an older treatment in a newer context), and our physicians are only willing to offer these clinical trials if we believe that it represents your best option. Being on a clinical trial ensures that you are receiving the very best care that you could be receiving at the present time, and will make a world of difference to patients who are dealing with a similar type of lung cancer in the near future.
Submitted by Eliza Folsom on November 14, 2023