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“It is increasingly clear that a fairly simple five-minute, low-dose, low-radiation scan can really save the lives of many people,” said Dr. Bernard J. Park, pulmonary surgeon and clinical director of the lung. screening service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. About 75 to 85% of cancers discovered with this screening are stage 1 and curable with surgery or radiotherapy, he estimated.
Dr Park said many people who signed up for screening had quit smoking or were trying to quit, but a few saw clear scans as a sign they could continue to smoke.
Dr Smith said the American Cancer Society needs to revise its own guidelines for lung cancer screening and that its advice would likely be similar to that of the task force.
In 2013, the American Academy of Family Physicians declined to recommend for or against CT screening for lung cancer, saying there was insufficient evidence. But the president, Dr Ada Stewart, said in an emailed statement on Monday that the academy would review the task force’s new evidence and decide whether to update its own recommendation to its members.
Globally, there were 2.09 million new cases of lung cancer in 2018, and the disease is also the leading cause of cancer death, killing 1.76 million people that year, according to the World Health Organization.
There were 228,820 new cases of lung cancer in the United States in 2020, and 135,720 people have died from it, according to the National Cancer Institute. About 90% of cases occur in people who smoke, and the risk of current smokers of developing the disease is about 20 times that of non-smokers.
Only about 20.5 percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis. Most cases are diagnosed late, after the cancer has started to spread. But if it can be found and treated early, a cure is possible, doctors say.
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