Lung cancer can form within the air sacs or airways of the lungs, leading to shortness of breath and difficulty breathing. If left undetected, the lung cancer eventually gains the ability to migrate out of the lungs, forming cancerous growths in one or more distant tissues in the body. Although the primary treatment for many lung cancers is surgery, some patients may develop inoperable lung cancer that will not respond to surgery. Patients with inoperable lung cancer may instead receive a number of other cancer therapies to treat symptoms of their disease.
Systemic Chemotherapy
A possible treatment for inoperable lung cancer is systemic chemotherapy. This treatment allows doctors to use drugs to target cancer cells that cannot be removed by surgery, as well as damage cancer cells growing in other tissues throughout the body. Systemic chemotherapy may use cocktails of cancer drugs that damage rapidly dividing cells, including lung cancer cells.
There are a range of chemotherapy drugs with a number of mechanisms of action on cancer cells, but generally chemo drugs prevent cancer cells from dividing, while also damaging structures the cell requires to survive. Over the course of treatment, inoperable lung cancer patients may experience a slowing down or cessation in cancer growth and tumor shrinkage, relieving some symptoms of inoperable lung cancer growth.
Stereotactic Radiotherapy
Some patients with inoperable lung cancer may receive stereotactic radiotherapy. Although doctors may not access the cancer growth with surgery, doctors can instead use targeted radiation to damage and kill the cancerous growth. The Lung Cancer Treatment Group, a consortium of health care providers based in Illinois and Indiana, explains that stereotactic radiation therapy uses medical imaging to identify areas of cancer growth within the body and then applies a very high dose of radiation into tumors.
Since stereotactic radiotherapy allows doctors to target lung tumor growths while avoiding healthy neighboring tissue, doctors can use higher and more effective doses of radiation to kill cancer cells.
Palliative Treatment
In some cases, patients with inoperable lung cancer may receive palliative treatment, intended to increase the patient's quality of life instead of cause cancer remission. Very advanced lung cancers may not be effectively controlled with cancer treatments, or the deleterious effects of aggressive cancer treatments may prove too harmful to some patients.
Palliative treatments for inoperable lung cancer therapy may involve radiation to slow cancer growth within specific tissues and to prevent cancer growth from incapacitating the patient, according to HealthTree, a medically reviewed health information site. Palliative care also commonly includes medication and emotional support to ease the suffering of the patient as cancer progresses.
