Talk:ALK positive lung cancer

EML4-ALK positive lung cancer

I have been a patient with this condition for the past year, so I would like to update the article a little, particularly to help the newly diagnosed. Firstly, I would like to change the name of the condition, as it is now more commonly known in medical and patient circles as ALK positive non-small cell lung cancer (or just ALK positive lung cancer for short). Whilst EML4 is, by far, the most common fusion partner for this condition, there are rarer fusion partners, which this article seems to ignore - perhaps those other fusion partners were not apparent when the article was originally written. I would also like to add that the median age of diagnosis is around 50, that it is more common in women and some other information that is now available, which perhaps was not several years ago. Of course, I will make the scientific references available, although much will come from the paper that I have already uploaded from Dr Sai-Hong Ignatious Ou, who is one of the world's leading experts. Shaun p hill (talk) 23:34, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Do you have reliable sources supporting all suggested changes? Ruslik_Zero 20:27, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I have references.

1. In recent years, the medical-scientific community tend to drop the "EML4" bit and call the general condition either "ALK positive lung cancer", "ALK positive non-small cell lung cancer", "ALK re-arrangement lung cancer", "ALK+" or some variation of this. For instance https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29488330/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32780660/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34589917/
2. Patient advocacy groups also refer to themselves as ALK Positive, rather than EML4-ALK. For instance https://www.alkpositive.org/ https://www.alkpositive.org.uk/
3. This medical publication discusses the existence of rarer non-EML4 fusion partners https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2018.36.15_suppl.8561 as does this scientific paper https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34589917/
4. The US patient advocacy group estimates the median age at diagnosis to be 50 https://www.alkpositive.org/what-is-alk and this lung cancer website puts the median age at 52 https://alk.lungevity.org/alk/about-alk-positive-lung-cancer I will try to find some scientific papers that quote the median age of diagnosis and also the female gender bias. When I make these changes, I will also link them to scientific papers which discuss this.

Shaun p hill (talk) 00:53, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I have made the changes to the article that I previously suggested. I would like to change the title of the article to "ALK positive lung cancer", but do not seem to be able to change the title (sorry, I am new to editing Wikipedia!). Please could someone else do this. Shaun p hill (talk) 16:00, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

You should see "move" link in menu. Ruslik_Zero 20:40, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Many thanks Ruslik! I have done this now :-) Shaun p hill (talk) 21:30, 5 February 2023 (UTC)