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The country's largest meeting of cancer experts revealed several advances on Saturday. The horrible news is what does not improve. Only 4% of men and women at high risk for lung cancer with lung cancer will be scanned for it while it is curable.
This figure has barely moved in a decade. Lung cancer detected before cough or other symptoms can be cured at 80% to at least 90%. People who are waiting to be sick have a 10% chance of surviving.
Cost is not the problem. Payroll insurance for CT scanners (abbreviation of computer tomography). But the public has no idea that it is necessary.
There is no public campaign because lung cancer is a politically incorrect disease, tainted by its link to tobacco. Most politicians, charities and underwriters did not want to touch it.
Unlike breast cancer. Everyone wants to join the war against that. An infinite range of products ranging from M & Ms to lipstick wears the pink breast cancer ribbon. In 2016, all presidential candidates were asked where they stood in the face of breast cancer, as if anybody could support him.
A Maine newspaper reported that Senator Susan Collins "was working to end breast cancer by 2020". Governor Andrew Cuomo, in New York, has touted the 2016 law banning copays for breast cancer screening.
It does not matter if the federal law has already done that. Politicians are eager to bask in the light of a pink campaign on a disease. All this advertising and political mojo works.
Some 68% of women regularly undergo mammography at the age of 55. "Women do not even ask their doctor if they should have a mammogram. They simply do it, "says Dr. Daniel Libby, clinical professor of pneumology at Weill Cornell Medical College. "But they do not hear the message that they have a history of smoking, they also need a lung scanner."
Lung cancer advocates need to take a page of the pink ribbon campaign. Nearly twice as many women die of lung cancer than breast cancer. Women who smoke are 1.5 to 2 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who smoke the same amount, warns Dr. David Yankelevitz, professor of radiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.
The fear of false positives prevents some people from being scanned. With a false positive, the scanner shows a spot on the lung and the patient undergoes a biopsy or waits for months in fear for another scan, then discovers that it is not a cancer.
New research published in Nature Medicine shows that artificial intelligence – computers that make algorithm-based decisions – may soon eliminate most false positives. Until then, it's not a joke, said Libby, but hardly as bad as discovering that you have advanced cancer that is not curable.
The US Preventative Services Task Force recommends pulmonary CT scans for people aged 55 to 80 who smoke a pack a day for 30 years or two a day for 15 years and who quit smoking less than 15 years ago . Dr. Mark Pasmantier, professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell and a leading researcher in the field of cancer detection, recommends an even wider use.
He says people who have smoked a pack a day for 10 years should be scanned – no matter how long they quit.
What about nonsmokers? Lung cancer is on the rise and non-smoking women are twice as affected as men. New data in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine show that the number of lung cancer deaths among non-smokers exceeds the number of deaths from ovarian cancer and cervical cancer in the UK . This is also happening in the United States.
Now that non-smokers are affected, the stigma around lung cancer fades. Meaning. Dianne Feinstein, Marco Rubio, Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito sponsor a bipartisan bill to promote lung cancer research and screening, particularly for women.
"By 2019, about 66,000 women will die because of this terrible disease," says Feinstein. Not to mention the number of deaths for men. Now that politicians are dealing with the issue, the next step is to choose a ribbon color.
Betsy McCaughey is a former Lieutenant Governor of New York.
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