Most people with lung cancer are diagnosed so late they will survive on average for just six months.
This was the stark message presented at an event hosted by the Irish Cancer Society in Dublin yesterday which aimed to raise awareness of lung cancer and the importance of having possible symptoms checked out quickly as early treatment is the key to survival.
Some 1,576 new cases of lung cancer are diagnosed in the Republic each year, and there are also around 1,500 deaths annually from the disease. About 563 new cases and 534 deaths a year are among women.
John McCormack, chief executive of the cancer society, said smoking was one of the biggest preventable causes of lung cancer. However, a number of cases every year also occurred in non-smokers.
Minister for Health Mary Harney said it was costing the Irish health service €1 billion a year to treat people with smoking-related illnesses.
Dr Jesme Fox, medical director of the UK's Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, said women were surviving breast cancer but not lung cancer. This was because very few were diagnosed early.
She stressed the need for people with any chest symptoms, such as a bad cough that was not going away or breathlessness that was getting worse, to seek medical advice.
"You need a chest x-ray; a simple cheap test. The chances are it will be nothing, but if it is lung cancer then you need to be diagnosed as early as possible."
She said a lot needed to change if the incidence of lung cancer was to be addressed. This included stopping young people from starting to smoke, restricting access to cigarettes by raising prices, investing more money in lung-cancer research, increasing awareness of the disease and its symptoms and putting in place easily-accessible services to stop smoking.
Marian Keegan, a mother of three from Walkinstown in Dublin, told the meeting she was diagnosed with lung cancer last November. She was lucky her tumour was found at an early stage. She underwent surgery to remove part of her lung as well as a course of chemotherapy. She was now feeling well.