“The best way to prevent lung cancer now is to make sure you're not currently smoking,” says Russell K. Hales, M.D.
Hales, who is a radiation oncologist at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center on the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus, notes that smoking, even as late as when you’ve had a lung cancer diagnosis, can improve the outcome of your treatment, in part because you can better tolerate therapy.
Is there anything that you can do to reduce your risk more, now? Hales says, “Lung cancer screening may be appropriate, although the benefits of screening have only been established for lung cancer patients who smoked for 30 years or more. Screening is also more than just a CT scan. We have other tests that we look at, markers in the blood, or in a patient's sputum, that can help us better identify which patients are likely to be at risk for lung cancer. Call 410-955-LUNG to find out more about screening.