Lung cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with 86 percent of sufferers dying within five years, according to Cancer Monthly. However, the specific life expectancy turns upon what type of lung cancer a patient has, how advanced the cancer is, his overall health and how aggressively the disease is treated. These factors can triple and even quadruple the overall survival rates.
Types of Lung Cancer
There are several types of lung cancer that can be broadly divided into small cell and non-small cell lung cancers. According to the numbers presented by Cancer Monthly, life expectancy is closely related to the particular type of lung cancer. For example, whereas the five-year survival rate for non-small cell lung cancers is a mere 5 percent, this rate increases to 17 percent for adenocarcinomas. Survival rates for large cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas are in the middle, at 11 and 15 percent respectively.
Staging
Just like other cancers, lung cancer is staged according to the size of the tumor, nodal involvement and whether there are distant metastases. Predictably, five-year survival rates decrease as the staging increases. For example, Cancer Monthly reports five-year survival rates of 60 to 80 percent if the tumor is less than 3cm and there are no metastases to lymph nodes or distant issues. This rate plummets to less than 5 percent if there are distant metastases or if the tumor has invaded the mediastinum where the heart, great vessels, trachea and esophagus are located.
Small Cell Cancers
According to the Lung Cancer Supportive Care Program, small cell lung cancer has the most rapid clinical course of any lung cancer. Overall, these patients tend to survive only a few months, in part because most of them already have distant metastases at the time of diagnosis. The two-year survival rate for those few patients who are diagnosed early is 20 percent. This plummets to less than 5 percent for patients with advanced disease.
New Drug
Originally approved to treat non-small cell cancers, Tarceva, or erlotinib, was approved by the FDA in 2010 to treat all lung cancers. The FDA said Tarceva extends the median survival by two to three months, compared with a placebo, after other treatments have failed.
Predictions
New York Times health columnist Jane E. Brody describes how difficult it is for doctors to make individual predictions for lung cancer patients' life expectancy. Brody reports that doctors are unable to accurately assess life expectancy unless death is imminent in a matter of days or weeks. Doctors often overestimate the amount of time a terminal patient has left.
