Lung Cancer - History

Lung cancer was extremely rare before the advent of cigarette smoking. Lung cancer was first recognized as a distinct disease in 1761. Different aspects of lung cancer were described further in 1810.[109] Malignant lung tumors made up only 1% of all cancers seen at autopsy in 1878, but had risen to 10–15% by the early 1900s. Case reports in the medical literature numbered only 374 worldwide in 1912. A review of autopsies showed that the incidence of lung cancer had increased from 0.3% in 1852 to 5.66% in 1952. In Germany, in 1929 physician Fritz Lickint recognized the link between smoking and lung cancer. This led to an aggressive anti-smoking campaign. The British Doctors Study, published in the 1950s, was the first solid epidemiological evidence of the link between lung cancer and smoking. As a result, in 1964 the Surgeon General of the United States recommended that smokers should stop smoking.

The connection with radon gas was first recognized among miners in the Ore Mountains near Schneeberg, Saxony. Silver has been mined there since 1470. However these mines are rich in uranium, with accompanying radium and radon gas. Miners developed a disproportionate amount of lung disease, eventually recognized as lung cancer in the 1870s. An estimated 75% of former miners died from lung cancer. Despite this discovery, mining continued into the 1950s due to the USSR's demand for uranium.


Treatment
The first successful pneumonectomy for lung cancer was carried out in 1933. Initially, pneumonectomy was the surgical treatment of choice.[118] However with improvements in cancer staging and surgical techniques, lobectomy with lymph node dissection has now become the treatment of choice.

Palliative radiotherapy has been used since the 1940s. Radical radiotherapy, initially used in the 1950s, was an attempt to use larger radiation doses in patients with relatively early stage lung cancer, but who were otherwise unfit for surgery. In 1997, continuous hyperfractionated accelerated radiotherapy (CHART) was seen as an improvement over conventional radical radiotherapy.[

With small cell lung carcinoma, initial attempts in the 1960s at surgical resection and radical radiotherapy were unsuccessful. In the 1970s, successful chemotherapy regimens were developed.



Originally from Wikipedia.org