Lung Cancer Screening

This post is dedicated to my friend Gustavo Andres Ramirez who lost his life to lung cancer.

The goal of a screening program is to find cancer at an early stage when there are fewer symptoms. Treatment at early stages of cancer can lead to more treatment options, less invasive surgery, and a higher survival rate. For example, in recent years, the five-year survival rate of persons whose cancers were diagnosed when they were still localized (had not spread) was almost 50%.

This drops to 2% for persons whose cancers were diagnosed after their cancers had spread distantly. Even though early detection can save lives, there is currently no approved screening test for lung cancer that has been proven to improve survival or detect localized disease. There are studies underway, though, to find appropriate screening tools.

Early detection of lung cancer is critical for improving survival of this disease because only 15% of lung cancers are found when they are localized. Since there are few or no symptoms in the early stages of the disease, the majority of lung cancers are diagnosed in the late stages of the disease. Symptoms of later-stage disease may include a persistent cough, sputum streaked with blood, chest pain, voice change, and recurrent pneumonia or bronchitis.

Testing people who are known to be at high risk for developing lung cancer may help find tumors at an earlier stage when they are small and more easily treated. People at high risk include men and women.

Source: LunCancer.org