NEW YORK, Aug. 8-ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings, 67, died late Sunday, just four months after he announced that he was being treated for lung cancer. He was a former smoker.
Neither Jennings nor ABC provided details of his diagnosis, but it is known that he received radiation treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center here. Jennings never returned to the anchor desk in the months since he revealed his condition.
Action Points
- Remind patients that smoking is the leading risk factor for lung cancer.
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer death among both men and women. The NCI estimates that 172,570 cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed this year and 163,510 lung cancer deaths will occur in 2005.
Roughly 87% of lung cancers are thought to result from smoking or exposure to second hand smoke. When Jennings' diagnosis was made public, friends and colleagues reported that he was a former smoker. After Jennings' death was announced last night, his colleague, Barbara Walters, made a plea for people not to smoke.
According to the American Cancer Society, 10 years after quitting smoking the risk of lung cancer drops to about a third of the risk of current smokers.
Although Jennings' specific diagnosis was not revealed, he did not have surgery, which suggested that he had small cell lung cancer (SCLC). It is nearly always smoking-related and accounts for about 13% of all lung cancers.
SCLC is the most aggressive cancer of the lung with median survival from time of diagnosis of two to four months. Moreover, at time of diagnosis it is more likely to be widely disseminated than other lung cancers, meaning that surgery is rarely an option. This cancer is, however, more responsive to chemotherapy and radiation than other lung cancers. Chemotherapy can achieve a four- to fivefold improvement in median survival, compared with patients who are not treated. With therapy, the median survival is 14 to 20 months for limited stage disease (confined to one side of the thorax) and eight to 13 months for extensive stage disease (disease beyond the ipsilateral thorax).
The NCI estimates that 10% of the total population of SCLC patients remains disease-free two years after initiation of therapy, but long-term survival is rare and patients remain at high risk of dying from both SCLC and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
SCLC is almost always diagnosed in current or former smokers. This cancer is also called oat cell carcinoma and small cell undifferentiated carcinoma.
Another possibility is that Jennings had late stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) or a very aggressive type of NSCLC, such as large-cell undifferentiated carcinoma, which accounts for about 10% to 15% of all NSCLC. This aggressive cancer can be found in any part of the lung and it carries a very poor prognosis.
Squamous cell carcinomas, which account for about 25% of NSCLC, and adenocarcinomas, which make up about 40% of cases of NSCLC, are considered more treatable if detected at an early stage.
Tarceva (erlotinib), an oral drug that targets epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) has recently been found to prolong survival in patients with advanced NSCLC who progressed after standard chemotherapy.
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