Although non smokers can get lung cancer, the risk is about ten times greater for smokers and is also increased by the number of cigarettes smoked per day and the number of years of smoking. If the UK population stopped smoking lung cancer would gradually become less common. Only a minority of patients with lung cancer can be cured, although the cure rate is slowly rising with improvements in treatment. However, all the remaining incurable patients can benefit from palliative treatment which can improve quality of survival.
Most lung cancer is diagnosed too late for curative treatment to be possible.
Moreover, most lung cancer patients have COPD as well because both conditions are mainly caused by smoking. For every 100 patients on a GP's list who have COPD only one or two will have lung cancer. If a GP suspects lung cancer and asks for a chest X-ray, this will usually fail to show an early cancer. This is because of a phenomenon called tumour doubling time. Every time the cells in a cancer divide, there will be twice as many as before and the cancer will be twice as big.