Metastatic Disease to Lungs
The lungs serve as a common site of secondary spread (known as metastatic disease, or metastases) for a wide variety of primary cancers, including colorectal cancer, upper gastrointestinal cancers, kidney cancer, sarcomas (primary soft tissue or bone cancers) and pediatric cancers. Sometimes lung metastases are the only area of cancer spread, without evidence of relapse elsewhere in the body. When this is the case, if the lung metastases are not too numerous or advanced, some patients will be cured with surgical resection of their metastatic disease (16-19).
As with primary lung cancer, there are patients that might otherwise be candidates for surgery, but prevented by unsatisfactory co-existing health, or surgically inaccessible metastatic cancer location. In these cases, for exactly the same reasons listed for early stage primary lung cancer patients, CyberKnife® radiosurgery may serve as a safe and effective treatment alternative for them (10). If a patient has limited lung metastases and no active disease elsewhere in the body, CyberKnife® radiosurgery may be a very reasonable treatment method, offering them the possibility of extended disease-free survival or cure. |
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