[Clinical examinations on lung cancer]

The incidence of lung cancer is increasing in Japan and it is important to know whether a patient has a history of primary smoking/second-hand smoking because smoking is the main cause of lung cancer. Lung cancer is often found on chest roentgenography. In order to determine the strategy of the treatment, the stage of the disease can be studied by the examinations of morphology(chest computed tomography), pathology(biopsy under bronchoscopy) and biochemistry(tumor markers and genetic analysis). Most lung cancers are detected in the advanced stage with metastasis. Performance status should be useful for the estimation of the prognosis of patients. In the symposium, we reported two of our clinical cases, in which urinary deoxypyridinoline, a bone absorption marker, facilitated the discovery of the bone metastasis of lung cancers with negative bone scans. We were requested to verify the early diagnosis of lung cancers with a collection of data on morphology, pathology and biochemistry.