Advances in Radiation Oncology in Lung Cancer

Although decades of laboratory and clinical research have led to incremental improvement in treatment outcome, lung cancer remains one of the most deadly diseases. This volume is unique in being devoted solely to the radiation oncology of lung cancer, and will be of great value to all who are involved in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Both non-small cell and small cell lung cancer are considered in detail. Current state-of-the-art treatment strategies and novel approaches that promise further improvements in outcome are explained and evaluated, with the aid of high-quality illustrations. Treatment-related toxicity is discussed, and further individual chapters focus on topics such as quality of life studies, prognostic factors and pitfalls in the design and analysis of clinical trials.
If you look at the map of the world and check the incidence rates of cancer, you will find lung cancer as one of the major health problems worldwide. This is irrespective of sex and age, health care systems and current media reports. It is simply a fact that we sometimes forget, but it always comes again as a reminder with every new patient worldwide. This burden is present for decades and although there seems to be stagnation in males, plateau is not reached in females yet. Even then, we would still have to deal with thousands of patients suffering from the deadly disease. And we deal with it with radiation therapy, a treatment modality being now older than one-hundred years. During that period we have learnt how to fractionate the dose and observe the effects both on tumors and normal tissues. We have also learnt how to combine radiation therapy with other treatment modalities. With the time, we became increasingly capable of documenting dose distribution and to build on computerised-driven technologies to image, verify and record. We also became capable of concentrating on progressively smaller and smaller constituents; from the whole body to organs and tissues and from them to cells and molecules. We use radiation biology and molecular oncology to provide necessary framework for the science of radiation oncology in lung cancer.
And this book is about it; what had been done and what is going on. But much more than that, it is a book of what we have learnt from the past and how successfully we should incorporate it in our future endeavours, all having the same aim, better radiation oncology of lung cancer patients.


Advances in Radiation Oncology in Lung Cancer