Overview
Case: Lung Cancer
A 59-year-old African American male with a past medical history of smoking (60 pack-years) sees his primary care provider complaining of shortness of breath (SOB) for the past two months. His SOB has become so significant that he cannot carry out his normal daily activities. He also reports blood in his sputum and that he has lost a significant amount of weight over the past six months without dieting. A chest X-ray was performed and a mass was visualized. Bronchoscopy and biopsy of the mass was performed and revealed a squamous cell lung cancer of advanced stage.
Instruction:
- Give an overview of the diagnosis including risk factors and how they cause or contribute
to adaptation or pathogenesis. - Give an in-depth discussion of the pathophysiology of your diagnosis as it occurs over time; include signs, symptoms, diagnostic studies and the underlying pathophysiologic process causing these signs and symptoms. Support this pathophysiology with high level evidence.
- Summarize treatments and outcomes in terms of pathophysiologic alterations.
- Include a discussion of the symptoms that your patient is exhibiting and discuss
treatments specifically aimed for your patient. - Support your case discussion with current (in the past 5 years) high level evidence. Patient information portals, disease association websites and other resources such as Up-to-date, Epocrates, Medscape, Mayo Clinic are not considered high levels of evidence and should be avoided for your presentations. While use of the course textbooks is permitted, a minimum of 3 high level citations outside of the course text is required.
- Length: A minimum of 350 words, not including references
- Citations: At least three high-level scholarly reference in APA from within the last 5 years