By Ed Weiner

The Search for Breaking News

News anchors Edward R. Murrow and Peter Jennings both died quickly of the same disease. How much has changed in lung cancer treatment in 40 years?

By Ed Weiner

Considering the similar outcomes for the two men, and the speed and relentlessness with which their diseases progressed, one question has to be asked: In the four decades between Murrow’s and Jennings’ deaths, has anything changed? Is anything that can be called “improvement” or real progress against lung cancer here or on the horizon?

While smoking rates have declined considerably since the U.S. Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health in 1964, one thing is unchanged: Most cases of lung cancer are still connected to smoking. Nonsmokers certainly get lung cancer, too; approximately 15 percent of cases occur in people who never smoked—a number that is surprisingly high to many people (see below). And many things besides smoking—asbestos, pollutants and other environmental and genetic causes—can put a person at an increased risk of developing the disease. Nonetheless, if smoking disappeared tomorrow, lung cancer would cease to be the second-most prevalent cause of death among men in America, just after heart disease, and the third most common among women, after heart disease and stroke.

Lung cancer statistics are grim: More people die of lung cancer than of breast, colon and prostate cancers combined, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2002, the latest year for which statistics are available from the CDC, more than 100,000 men and 80,000 women were diagnosed with lung cancer; within those 12 months, more than 90,000 men and 67,000 women died of it. Lung cancer occurs predominately in men over 40 and women over 60. It’s also one of the most expensive cancers to treat, costing upwards of $5 billion a year.

There is no reliable screening test currently recommended for lung cancer, though clinical trials are now under way to determine whether low-dose CT scans of people at high risk, such as smokers, will save lives. In general, lung cancer is diagnosed when a patient shows symptoms, and the cancer is already at an advanced stage. That’s the way it was in Murrow’s time, and as it is now.

Murrow, to the dismay of friends and colleagues, had had a persistent cough for a long while. He was in general ill health, and looked it. He would get the shakes, the sweats, and experience general weakness. He appeared to be older than his years. Then he developed a hoarseness, and that became throat pain and hemorrhaging. A chest X-ray showed a spot on his lung.

Treatment options were limited. There was no chemotherapy to speak of in the early 1960s. Likely diagnosed with a type of lung cancer called non-small cell adenocarcinoma, Murrow had his left lung removed, and a regimen of cobalt radiation was begun.

It was a major, chest-cracking operation. Today, surgeons can do less-invasive procedures, notes thoracic surgeon Frank C. Detterbeck of Yale University in New Haven, Conn. “At the medical centers at the forefront of cancer research, the majority of surgery for lung cancer is done with thoracoscopy—using a video camera at the end of a tube that goes in through a very small incision,” he says. “It’s similar, in a way, to laparoscopic surgery for gall bladders and other conditions.”