Lung Cancer

Lung cancer treatment relies on not only an accurate staging of the disease, the precise identification of predictive tumor-related biomarkers, but also on careful evaluation of patients medical history in order to avoid treatment-related toxicity of each specific treatment strategy as well as respect patient’s preferences. Routine genomic testing of lung cancers has enabled many patients to benefit from targeted personalized treatments which each has their own side-effect patterns and poses a constant challenge to the treating physician, as most of these patient subsets are rare and can be treated by multiple treatment lines. Therefore, a solid knowledge on all intervention-related adverse events and drug toxicities is essential for an optimal decision-making process. The majority of lung cancer patients are diagnosed at an advanced, metastatic, stage of the disease, correlated with a dismal prognosis. Systemic palliative therapy remains the mainstay. This chapter describes the standard drug options and their respective toxicities. Side effects of more complex multimodality treatments of early non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as well as small-cell lung cancer (SCLC), usually using the same cytotoxic agents, jointly with surgery and radiotherapy, are discussed in the second part of this chapter.