Lung Cancer Screening

Lung cancer has been the focus of medical news reports this week, with the death of Peter Jennings and the Dana Reeve’s announcement that she too has lung cancer. What effect will these celebrity cases have on the rest of us who perhaps light up? And what can smokers do to protect themselves?

Two-thirds of lung cancer patients are usually in an advanced stage when diagnosed, which portends less than a 20 percent five year survival rate. And once one starts, it’s almost impossible to quit. Angelo, who is a smoker, says, "I’ve been trying to stop, it’s just, it’s just hard, it’s a bad habit, it’s worse then heroine, it’s worse than alcohol, drugs, it’s just a hard habit to stop."

And many are living in denial that their smoking can cause them a deadly serious illness: lung cancer. Josh, also a smoker, says, "I think people will smoke anyway, I think often time you just don’t think about the consequences of smoking, whether a celebrity dies of smoking or whatever people are going to smoke."

Lung cancer causes more cancer deaths than colon, breast and prostate cancers combined. 87 percent of lung cancer deaths can be attributed to tobacco use. But will statistics, and stars’ illnesses, be enough to deter smokers? Dr. David Fein, Medical Director of the Princeton Longevity Center, says, "Hopefully people will stop and think, and then use it as an opportunity to decide to make some changes in their life styles of those things that are putting them at risk."

Nearly 50 million Americans continue to light up. What can they do, aside from quitting, to protect themselves? Unfortunately, nothing has been proven to be an adequate screening test for lung cancer...one that has been proven to lower the risk of death through early detection. However, fingers are crossed, that a spiral cat scan of the chest may provide that benefit. "The accuracy is clearly there we can see an object in the lungs that are as small as one to two millimeters and that’s much earlier then what you are going to pick up with any other screening technique," says Dr. Fein.

A national trial to study this test will go till 2009 as nearly 50,000 current or former smokers are followed with serial scans to see if there is a 20 percent or greater drop in lung cancer deaths when ct scans are used. "When you first screen somebody you are going to go through this process of trying to sort out what’s a tumor or what’s a benign scare. If someone has a base line screen from that point on anything new that shows up has about a 95% likely hood of being a lung cancer," says Dr. Fein.

Again, it’s not proven that cat scans can reduce death risk, and it is not recommended yet by the U.S. Preventitive Services Task Force. But given that chest x-rays and sputum samples have not shown to be helpful screening procedures, this is perhaps the best opportunity to detect a cancer early enough to remove it. It’s the best that we have now; so the key is not starting, and if one does smoke, quit.

For more information, go to: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/nlstqa