ABSTRACT
Lung cancer in modern times has advanced leaps and bounds with advances in surgical techniques, with video-assisted, robotic and lung-sparing approaches dominating the field. The United Kingdom awaits a review on the policy of a national lung cancer screening programme. Modern knowledge of the effect of smoking dates from the 1950s when the evidence that it caused cancer of the lung became compelling. The principal harmful effects of prolonged cigarette smoking are illustrated by the results of the American Cancer Society's most recent study of a million people and of the study of 34,000 male British doctors initiated by the British Medical Research Council. The exceptionally high relative risk for cancers of the mouth, pharynx and larynx in the British study, which have been grouped together because of paucity of numbers, had wide confidence limits because only two deaths from this group of cancers were observed in non-smokers.
