What Is Mesothelioma?

Mesothelioma is a cancer of the protective lining or the mesothelium. This is a protective lining of either your heart, lungs, or your abdomen. It’s caused when asbestos fibers get lodged either because you ingested them or you breathed them in, they get lodged in the protective lining. It causes irritation and inflammation, ultimately cellular damage, and that causes cancer. Mesothelioma is different from lung cancer, number one, in where it’s located. It’s located in that protective lining of the lung, whereas lung cancer is usually located in the airspace or bronchial space. Number two, mesothelioma, the primary risk factor for mesothelioma is your exposure to asbestos, that usually occurs in the workplace, but not always. And what’s different about mesothelioma is when someone comes to us and they call us and they say, I’ve got mesothelioma or my dad’s got mesothelioma. The one thing we know at that point is they got mesothelioma because they were exposed to asbestos. We don’t have to ask whether or not they were exposed to asbestos. We know they were. The question then just becomes, where were they exposed to asbestos? how? and when?. Another significant difference between mesothelioma and lung cancer is with respect to smoking. So everybody knows that lung cancer is caused by smoking. That’s one of the potential causes of lung cancer. Smoking is not a factor in mesothelioma. It’s a proven scientific fact that smoking does not cause mesothelioma. So that’s a significant difference also between the two diseases. Well, it differs from lung cancer in that when we’re talking about lung cancer, we can usually talk about a survival rate of possibly the 5-year survival rate or the 20-year survival rate. When we start talking about mesothelioma, unfortunately, it’s so aggressive, and it depends on the cell type, but mesothelioma is so aggressive that we’re usually talking about months rather than years, unfortunately.