Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be

talking to you about lung cancer. If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at zero definals.com slash lung cancer or in the respiratory section of the

zero to finals medicine book. So let's get straight into it.

Lung cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK, and that's behind breast and prostate cancer,

and cigarette smoking is the biggest cause, and around 80% of lung cancers are thought to be

preventable if the person didn't smoke cigarettes.

So let's talk briefly about the three main types. There's non-small cell lung cancer and the two

types of non-small lung cancer are squamous cell carcinoma which accounts for about 35% of lung cancers

and adenocasanoma which counts for about 25% of lung cancers, and adenocarsenoma, which counts for about 25% of lung cancers.

Then there's small cell lung cancer, which accounts for about 20% of lung cancers.

And small cell lung cancers contain neurosecretary granules.

So these are the cells of the small cell lung cancer that contain

granules that can be released to secrete neuroendocrine hormones into the blood. So these are any type

of hormones that are responsible for stimulating the nervous system or stimulating the tissues of the body.

And this means that small cell lung cancer can be responsible for a number of different

paroneoplastic syndromes, and we'll talk about those later.

So what are the signs and symptoms of lung cancer?

Some of them are quite nonspecific, like shortness of breath and cough, but there's also some real red flags for lung cancer, and that's things like hemoptosis or coughing up blood, finger clubbing, recurrent pneumonias, weight loss, and lymphadenopathy. And the most commonly affected nodes are the superclavicular nodes,

which you can palpate above the clavicle, and they're the first ones that you'll find on

examination. What investigations do you do? Well, chest x-tra is the first-line investigation,

if you suspect there might be lung cancer, and findings that are suggestive of cancer are things like hyla enlargement,

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