A physician yesterday urged the public, especially those with a smoking habit, not to overlook chronic coughing, after the condition led to the recent diagnosis of lung cancer in a 80-year-old man.
Tung’s Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital’s Radiation Oncology director Yeh Chi-yuan (葉啟源) said the patient, surnamed Tsai (蔡), had been smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day for the past four decades.
“Tsai started coughing up white phlegm recently. His first instinct was that he had a cold and he subsequently sought medical care at a local clinic.
He only turned to our hospital after the cold medications he was prescribed failed to assuage his condition, even after three weeks,” Yeh said.
The 80-year-old first sought outpatient service at the hospital’s Department of Chest Medicine, which discovered through computerized tomography scanning a 1.5cm tumor in the man’s right lung and diagnosed him with stage-one squamous cell carcinoma of the lungs.
Yeh said that while Tsai’s cancer had yet to spread to his lymph nodes, his advanced age made him unfit to undergo surgeries and traditional chemotherapy.
The hospital opted for a treatment called stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) that it said was ideal to treat patients with early inoperable lung cancer.
“A complete session of conventional radiation therapy normally takes two month and up to 35 treatments, while the SBRT procedure uses a higher dose of carefully targeted radiation to treat tumors,” Yeh said.
Yeh said he was able to control the elderly patient’s conditions after only a five-day treatment session, adding that his cancer was now in remission.
The early symptoms of lung cancer are often overlooked, Yeh said, as other respiratory illnesses also shared the same symptoms with it, such as coughing and bloody phlegm, as well as chest pain and tightness.
“It is vital that people at high risk for lung cancer stay vigilant for suspicious symptoms and seek immediate medical attention when needed,” Yeh said.
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