Originally published September 4 2005
Procedure may help gauge lung cancer stage
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The procedure is called transesophageal ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration, or EUS-FNA, and is used to help make earlier diagnoses of lung cancer, WebMD reports.
Efforts to rein in lung cancer, the No. 1 cause of cancer death for U.S. men and women, continue to be a top health priority for doctors and patients alike.
The latest finding: A minimally invasive procedure may help gauge lung cancer stage, which could curb unneeded surgery in some patients.
The finding appears in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
It comes from researchers including Jouke Annema, MD, PhD, of the pulmonary medicine division of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
The procedure is called transesophageal ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration, or EUS-FNA.
In EUS-FNA, doctors use ultrasound technology to guide a fine needle to lymph nodes in the lung.
The needle harvests cells from the lymph nodes.
All of the patients had non-small cell lung cancer, the most common kind of lung cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
Doctors inserted a scope through a tiny hole in the chest to look at the patients' lungs; tissue samples can be taken and examined by this method.
The tests may complement each other, the researchers note.
Lung cancer staging helps determine how a person with lung cancer will do in the long term.
Lung cancer that has spread to distant sites may not require surgery.
Better lung cancer staging might cut unneeded lung cancer surgeries, write the researchers.
They note that up to 40% of thoracotomies (partial or total removal of a lung) for non-small cell lung cancer have been reported to be unnecessary due to imperfections in determining the extent of the disease prior to surgery.
The researchers estimate that 16% of thoracotomies in their study could have been avoided by using EUS-FNA findings in addition to mediastinoscopy.
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