Advances in Lung Cancer Detection and Personalized Treatment

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning, calling in from the Greek islands. He’s trying to learn how we can live longer. We have Dr. Peter Michalos. And Dr. Michalos, have you found any new revelations what’s going to make us live longer?

0:15 Speaker 2 Well, I think one of the big components is clean air, and definitely the Greek islands have a lot of clean air, and it’s very important. And as we’re learning, that clean air is very important for prevention of cancer because we know when the air is dirty, like with smoking, radon, pollution, occupational hazards, and the lungs bring in all that stuff,

0:39 as we also learned about what happened in 9-11 with all those aerosolized chemicals and particles, it increases the risk of lung cancer. The lung is very important for longevity, and it develops when we’re in We’re in gestation. About four to six weeks of pregnancy, the lung starts forming, and it’s quite amazing. And it develops all the way

1:03 up to age 20 years old. And we actually breathe 17,000 to 20,000 times a day, and every year we breathe. Our lungs work 24-7 for us, 6 million to 7.5 million breaths a year because we average... between 12 and 20 breaths a minute, depending on our situation. And recently, the lungs have been in the news because of Pope

1:29 Leo’s diagnosis of the most common form of lung cancer called adenocarcinoma. And it’s interesting how on the right side of our body, we have three lobes of our lung and on the left, we only have two. And they removed his right lower lobe. And as I speculated when we talked about it last week on your other show

1:51 when it first was diagnosed. We said that they probably did a biopsy during surgery, and it turns out they did that. They took a sample. They saw it’s the adenocarcinoma type, so that’s when they made the decision to play it safe and take out that entire lobe, because if you can catch it early, take out the entire lobe,

2:11 then you have a 67% survival rate over five years. And they also, now it came out that they also did samples of the lymph nodes to see if it spread. Once a cancer spreads, for example, if it goes to the brain or other parts of the body, then the survival rate’s only 12%. Now, what are the early symptoms

2:31 to watch out for? It’s cough that won’t go away, shortness of breath, If you start coughing up some blood, those are signs that you may have a problem. The current recommendation for screening, there is a low-dose CAT scan, low-dose radiation, and they recommend it for people who smoke what they call 20-pack years. If they smoke one pack

2:52 a day for the 20 years, then they should have this screening test, and you can spot it really quickly, and you can see exactly where the tumor is. And if you’ve smoked in the last 15 years, they also recommend it. For people who quit for 15 years, then they don’t recommend screening. Medicare insurance, which most people have

3:12 who are over 65, it only pays for scans up to 77, but you can always get access to it privately. The good news is that if you get it out and you catch it early, you can do immunotherapy, chemotherapy, and now it’s so sophisticated that when they biopsy the tumor and If it has certain genes, it’ll tell you

3:34 whether it’s going to respond well to the chemotherapy to kill it. And other fascinating screening methods right here on Long Island is a private company called Rua Diagnostics, and they are with breath analysis, and they are working on a project where just through the breath you breathe in, it can pick up a lung cancer just by breathing

3:57 into a machine, and it analyzes with with the gases, basically the breath that comes out of your lungs, whether you have lung cancer. And they’re also doing it for, it’s going to be tested now for colon cancer. So that’s going to be an amazing breakthrough when that comes out.

4:16 And the other thing that we’ve talked about is the cancer vaccines. They can sample the tumor and find out what exactly makes that your specific tumor unique. And within a couple of maybe a month, they can develop a specific cancer vaccine for your tumor to activate your immune system to go after it and kill it. So basically,

4:38 we need to keep our lungs healthy, try to have clean, fresh air. Consider using a HEPA air filter in your bedroom, especially when there’s those wildfires or if you work in an office where there’s a lot of chemicals or environmental issues.

4:52 And also, there’s a whole list that we’ve talked about, about food, vitamins, the Mediterranean diet, on helping to stimulate not eating too much sugar, because we now know sugar helps grow cancers. And again, we dedicated an entire section on what tests to get, even the new cancer blood test, in my new book, The Death of Aging, on Amazon,

5:15 just to discuss what you can do to help diagnose things earlier, and things you can do to strengthen and boost your immune system, and of course, keep listening to WABC for all this fresh, breaking news on how to stay healthy and live long and prosper. Dr.

5:33 Speaker 1 Peter Michalos, thank you so much, and we’ll catch up again real soon.

5:38 Speaker 2 Thank you, John, for always getting the truth out on the Cats Roundtable.