According to the American Lung Association, lung cancer survival rates are on the rise, but some racial groups continue to experience higher rates of death because of lung cancer.
Similarly, the survival rate for Black Americans remained at 19% while the rate for people of color grew from 15% to nearly 25% over the past four years.
Lung Cancer Survival Does Not Improve For Everyone
The report emphasizes a point highlighted by Harold Wimmer, president, and chief executive officer of the lung association: more people are surviving lung cancer, but there are still health disparities for communities of color.
The American Lung Association released a news release in which he said that everyone deserves a healthy, long life.
The state-level variations in survival rates were often large in addition to racial disparities: Connecticut had the highest overall survival rate, whereas Alabama had the lowest.
A cancerous cell grows out of control in the body over time. Cancerous cells become malignant when they grow out of control.
This disease starts in the lung and spreads to lymph nodes and other parts of the body, including the brain. Other types of cancer can migrate to the lungs from other organs. A cancer cell spreads to other organs by metastasizing.
Cancers of the lungs are categorized as small cells and non-small cells. Both types require different treatments. A higher percentage of patients with non-small cell lung cancer develop the disease than do patients with small cell lung cancer.
In both smokers and second-hand smoke-exposed individuals, smoking causes the majority of lung cancers. However, lung cancer can also occur in people who have never smoked or been exposed to second-hand smoke for a short period. Such cases may not have a definitive cause.
The cells lining the lungs are damaged when you smoke, according to doctors. Smoking, which emits chemicals that cause cancer, changes the lungs almost immediately.
This damage can initially be repaired by the body. However, when you are exposed repeatedly, the normal lung cells are increasingly damaged. Cancer develops as a result of the damage-causing the cells to act abnormally.
In general, 25 percent of cases are diagnosed at an early stage when they have a greater chance of surviving the full five years, while 46 percent of cases are not detected until the end of the five years when the survival rate is only 4%. Early detection is more common in Massachusetts, while it is less common in Hawaii.
When low-dose CT scans are performed on high-risk individuals, death rates from lung cancer can be reduced by up to 20%, however, only about 6% of high-risk individuals are screened. The lowest screening rates are in California and Wyoming, at 1%. About 18% of Massachusetts’s residents are screened.
According to reports, more than 21 % of patients do not receive any kind of treatment at all. Although medical treatment may not be available to some patients for several reasons, the association maintains that medical treatment should not be halted because of ignorance, stigma, cost, or a sense of fatality after a diagnosis.
Additionally, the report revealed that people of color have poorer outcomes than white people, including having a lower likelihood of being diagnosed early and receiving surgery, as well as receiving no treatment at all.
Medicare fee-for-service programs cover lung cancer screening in 40 states, but only seven of them do, and three states were unable to provide any information about their policies.