Chronic Cough Could be Due to Lung Cancer

BBC News recently reported that chronic cough may be due to lung cancer.

Here are my two cents on this condition in support of this assertion.

I often seen patients for chronic cough... not the kind that has been going on for only a few weeks, but the kind of cough that has gone on for over 1 or more years. Even 10-20 years.

It is not unusual for such patients to have seen an ENT, GI, pulmonary, and allergy specialists to try and stop their cough.

In particular, such patients may be informed their cough is not due to the lungs after getting a chest x-ray and pulmonary function tests which all come back normal along with lack of response to inhaler medications.

Unfortunately, some patients' chronic cough is due to lung cancer which is only discovered on additional studies including bronchoscopy and CT scan of the chest. Obtaining only a chest X-ray and breathing tests are not sufficient enough.

Now, it certainly is not necessary to perform these additional specialized studies in every patient who has been coughing for a few weeks... but when somebody has been coughing for over 1 year, a more intensive search for abnormalities is required.

In my clinic, it is not uncommon that a patient who has been coughing for over 1+ years ends up being found to have lung cancer.

Of course, there are other causes of chronic cough including reflux, allergies, post-nasal drip, medication side effect, etc that also needs to be looked into.

For more info on chronic cough.

Source:
Persistent cough 'could be lung cancer warning' BBC News 5/6/12

Cigarettes Contain Radioactive Polonium

Cigarettes are known to cause cancer...

But we now know there's another reason why... they contain radioactive material, specifically polonium-210!

Tobacco companies also have known about it since 1959. As reported in ABC, historical documents reveal tobacco companies not only knew about the radioactive substance, but studied it, then refused to do anything about it!

They figured out that:

1) It caused "cancerous growths" in the lungs of smokers,
2) Calculated how much radiation a regular smoker would ingest over 20 years

Then they kept the research secret. The level of deception is breath-taking.

The radiation alone from cigarettes can account for up to 138 deaths for every 1,000 smokers over period of 25 years.

Even more disturbing, is that ALL tobacco products on the market today still contain radioactive polonium. This is in spite of washing techniques available since 1980 to remove the radioactivity but refused by tobacco companies to perform whether due to cost or the fact that washing would remove the addictive nicotine component as well.

Take home message?

STOP smoking! It's killing you through not only harmful chemicals, but also radioactivity!

Read the ABC article here.

Reference:
Cigarette Smoke Radioactivity and Lung Cancer Risk. Nicotine Tob Res (2011) doi: 10.1093/ntr/ntr145

Beating Heart in a Box

With heart and lung transplants, the current standard is to transport the heart (or any other organ to be transplanted) inside an icebox cooler on ice. It's the same kind of icebox cooler you would use to take on a picnic. Think about it... You can buy a human organ transportation container off of Amazon.com for $39. In fact, I would not be surprised if some medical centers purchased such icebox coolers from Amazon.com.

Well, a company called TransMedics is aiming to elevate organ transportation technology from the icebox cooler to a cyborg-like container where the heart is warm, alive, and still-beating from donor to recipient. Same goes for the lung. Others soon to follow!

Check out these videos!