Medical Center Tips

Hello.  This is Dr.  David Cathcart from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St.  Joseph, Missouri. And I'm a family practice doctor.  And we're going to talk about lung cancer and what causes lung cancer, primarily.  The lungs are very sensitive tissue.  Of course, the lungs are made up of very small air sacs, called alveoli.  And these air sacs are the exchange of oxygen,which is one of the necessary gases that our body needs, and get rid of carbon dioxide,which is a byproduct of metabolism, a byproduct of life.  So, these tissues are extremely sensitive to outside agents.  We talked about free radicals in another segment.  Free radicals form in the atmosphere, as well as they do in our diet.  One of the concerns about the ozone is with loss of the ozone, there's more free radicals forming.  Pollution is a big cause of free radicals.  So when we breathe these free radicals in and they get into and come in contact with this very sensitive lung tissue, changes happen.  They happen at the DNA level that affects the programmed patterns of how those cells replicate and divide.  They start going haywire.  They go crazy, and they grow fast.  And that is cancer.  Those cancerous cells obviously don't work like regular cells do.  Plus they have a tendency to spread through the lymph system, as we talked about in another segment, to other parts of the body.  So lung cancer is also probably caused by smoking more than anything else.  And smoking is probably the single biggest risk factor for lung cancer.  Certainly other ones are there as well, such as pollution in the air, such as coal miners.  Certainly people that work around asbestos are also at high risk for developing lung cancer.  This is Dr.  Cathcart.  Thanks for joiningme while we talked about lung cancer.