Medical Center Tips

Hi, this is Doctor David Cathcart from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St.  Joseph, Missouri,and we're going to talk about how lung cancer damages your body.  And, in an earlier segment,you may have seen that cancers of the lung are frequently caused by things such as smoking,air pollutants, free radical formation that damages very sensitive lung tissue, and once the DNA of those cells are restructured, they start to grow.  And as they grow, they don't function like normal, healthy lung tissue.  They tend to block tubules, block airway passages,sometimes they'll bleed.  They can cause a chronic cough.  These cells typically don't stay in one spot, and they tend to metastasize or move to other areas of the body.  Typically,lung cancer spreads to. . . to other organs, such as the liver, or such as the brain.  Lung cancers are probably one of the most common kinds of cancers that we see, and probably one of the most deadly.  But if they're. . . one, also, probably one of the ones that's easiest to avoid if you just stop smoking.  This is Doctor David Cathcart talking about lung cancer. Thank you for joining me.