Screening for Lung Cancer: An Overview |Biomedgrid

Lung Cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide; the vast majority of cases (far to 80%) are diagnosed at an advanced stage, when treatment options are limited. Aiming to change that scenario, a lot of interest has arisen from the scientific community in the last decades in order to track a pathway to allow earlier diagnoses. The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), published in 2011, was one of the first important studies about effective Lung Cancer screening. It consisted on a clinical trial conducted in the United States with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) in the early detection of lung cancer in high-risk patients. The NLST included more than 53,000 participants aged 55 to 74 years, who had a history of smoking for at least 30 years or had quit smoking within the past 15 year. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two screening groups: one group underwent LDCT annually for three years, and the other group underwent chest X-ray annually for the same period. The results of the study showed that LDCT reduced lung cancer mortality by 20% compared to chest X-ray. In addition, LDCT allowed for the detection of more cases of early-stage lung cancer than chest X-ray.