The health care provider will perform a physical exam and ask questions about your medical history. You will be asked if you smoke, and if so, how long you have smoked.
When listening to the chest with a stethoscope, the health care provider can sometimes hear fluid around the lungs, which could (but doesn't always) suggest cancer.
Tests that may be performed to diagnose lung cancer or see if it has spread include:
Chest x-ray
CBC
Sputum test to look for cancer cells
Bone scan
CT scan of the chest
MRI of the chest
Positron emission tomography (PET) scan
Thoracentesis
In some cases, the health care provider may need to remove a piece of tissue from your lungs for examination under a microscope. This is called a biopsy. There are several ways to do this:
Bronchoscopy combined with biopsy
Pleural biopsy
CT-scan-directed needle biopsy
Mediastinoscopy with biopsy
Open lung biopsy
Endoscopic esophageal ultrasound (EUS) with biopsy
If the biopsy reveals you do have lung cancer, more imaging tests will be done to determine the stage of the cancer. Stage means how big the tumor is and how far it has spread. Non-small cell lung cancer is divided into five stages:
Stage 0 - the cancer has not spread beyond the inner lining of the lung
Stage I - the cancer is small and hasn't spread to the lymph nodes
Stage II - the cancer has spread to some lymph nodes near the original tumor
Stage III - the cancer has spread to nearby tissue or spread to far away lymph nodes
Stage IV - the cancer has spread to other organs of the body such as the other lung, brain, or liver
Cancer Term:(malignant neoplasm) is a class of diseases in which a group of cells display uncontrolled growth, invasion that intrudes upon and destroys adjacent tissues, and sometimes metastasis, or spreading to other locations in the body via lymph or blood. These three malignant properties of cancers differentiate them from benign tumors, which do not invade or metastasize. Cancer-ar-foundation
