This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Paul Fischer, MD; John W. Richards, MD
Medical College of Georgia Doctors Ought to Care Augusta

Alan Blum, MD
Baylor College of Medicine Houston Doctors Ought to Care Augusta, Ga

JAMA. 1987;258(22):3255.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

McFarlane and colleagues¹ have recently published an article based on 159 necropsy-proved cases of lung cancer during a 12-year period at one medical center. They suggest that there may be a large and undiagnosed reservoir of lung cancer cases in the population, that the relationship between smoking and lung cancer is overstated, and that the observed increase in the rate of lung cancer in women is due to occupational carcinogen exposure.

It is hardly surprising that patients pass through a stage during which their lung cancer is either asymptomatic or symptomatic but unsuspected by their physician. Nor is it surprising that some patients with lung cancer will die of other diseases. As indicated in the article, most of these deaths are due to diseases that are related to tobacco smoking (ie, myocardial infarction, pneumonia, and stroke). Of the 2996 necropsies performed, lung cancer was found as . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?