Counting the number of lung cancer cells circulating in a patient's blood could help understanding how the disease develops and improve treatment options, according to a British study published Tuesday.

HTML clipboard Counting the number of lung cancer cells circulating in a patient's blood could help understanding how the disease develops and improve treatment options, according to a British study published Tuesday.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers detail how they studied the number of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in 101 lung cancer patients before and after one cycle of chemotherapy.

The team discovered that patients who had five or more CTCs were much less likely to survive the disease. The average overall survival was 4.3 months for patients with five or more CTCs compared to 8.1 months for patients with fewer than five.

The findings suggest that counting CTCs could be a simple way to monitor how well a patient is responding to treatment within a few weeks of starting it, the researchers said.

"We now need to test our findings in more patients but, if our results are confirmed, there is now the potential to tailor treatments to individual patients and find new ways to treat the disease," said Fiona Blackhall, a doctor from the Christie cancer hospital in Manchester who worked on the study, which is funded by the charity Cancer Research UK.

Lung cancer kills 1.2 million people a year around the world and is one of the lowest survival rates of any cancer because over two-thirds of patients are diagnosed at a late stage when curative treatment is not possible. (Agencies)

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