A large study involving over 9,000 people getting checked for lung cancer has brought some important insights.
This research, shared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows that the real-world experience of lung cancer screening can be quite different from what major trials suggest.
Let’s break this down. Lung cancer is a serious illness, and catching it early can save lives.
Doctors use a special kind of low-dose CT scan to find lung cancer early in people who are at high risk. This is great, but like any medical test, it’s not without risks.
In a famous study called the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), these risks seemed manageable. But this new study shows that when lung cancer screening is done in everyday healthcare, things can be more complicated.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, with help from the National Cancer Institute, worked on this.
They teamed up with experts from the PROSPR network, which focuses on improving cancer screening. They looked at data from five different U.S. healthcare systems between 2014 and 2018.
Here’s what they found: In these real-world settings, about 16% of people had something unusual show up on their first scan.
For about 9.5% of these people, it turned out to be lung cancer within a year. Also, nearly 32% needed more imaging tests, and about 2.8% had to go through more invasive procedures.
But there’s a catch. The complications from these extra tests and procedures were a lot more common than what the NLST study had shown.
This is a big deal because it means that lung cancer screening can sometimes lead to tough situations and tough choices.
The researchers say we need better ways to make lung cancer screening safer and more effective. It’s not just about finding cancer early; it’s also about making sure the benefits of screening outweigh the risks and downsides.
They’re calling for smarter strategies to improve the quality of care and to focus screening on people who really need it and will benefit the most.
In simple terms, imagine lung cancer screening as a net trying to catch as many fish (cancer cases) as possible. But this net also catches some other things (complications).
The study shows that in the real world, this net might catch more than we expected, and we need to be careful about how we use it.
To sum up, this study sheds light on the real challenges of lung cancer screening. It’s a wake-up call for healthcare providers to look closely at how they do these screenings.
The goal is to make sure that people get the benefits of early cancer detection without unnecessary risks.
If you care about smoking, please read studies about why some non-smokers get lung disease and some heavy smokers do not, and smoking cessation drug may help treat Parkinson’s disease.
For more information about heart health, please see recent studies about new way to prevent heart attacks and strokes, and results showing this drug for heart disease may reduce COVID-19 risk.
The research findings can be found in Annals of Internal Medicine.
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