Many doctors are taking a cautious approach. “I will offer it on a case-by-case basis,” says Dr. Kathy Albain, an oncologist at Loyola University of Chicago. Not everyone wants to know about every last nodule on their lungs. This week Albain saw a lung-cancer survivor who said, “’I don’t want to risk finding little dots that I’ll have to worry about.’”
It’s a legitimate concern. Dr. Harvey I. Pass, chief of thoracic surgery at New York University School of Medicine and an investigator in this week’s study, is a proponent of CT screening“ as long as the patient understands that there isn’t certainty about what something may be.” Rather than biopsy every last nodule, he tests the ones that subsequent CT scans show are growing. “It’s a process. It’s not just a CT scan,” he says.
“CT is a powerful imaging tool, and when you image the lungs, you find all sorts of abnormalities, most of which are not cancer,” says Smith. The lung is delicate, which means it can collapse with biopsies. “It’s not the harm of the test. It’s the pathway the test can put you down,” says Smith.
Not every hospital is ready to interpret the results of CT scans. “Screening has to be done with quality-assurance measures, like with mammography,” says lead investigator Claudia Henschke of New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
In the future, genetic markers may help doctors identify candidates for screening. And perhaps there will be more government funding for research, as well. “Lung cancer is getting six to eight times less than breast cancer, when there are many more people dying of lung cancer,” says Unger.
Ideally, the future will also bring more Americans who just say no to cigarettes. More than 85 percent of people who get lung cancer are current or former smokers and millions of Americans fall into that category. More than one in five adult Americans still smoke. “People sometimes think we’re Johnny One-Note,” says the ALA’s Edelman. “But the best way to deal with lung cancer is smoking prevention in kids and teenagers and smoking cessation in adults. As a society, we can do a lot more to reduce smoking rates and therefore reduce the burden of lung cancer.”
The above information thankfully comes from the newsweek.com at the following link.
