Washington – Use of routine chest X-rays to hunt lung cancer leads to frequent false alarms, but when tumors are found, they tend to be early- stage, say preliminary results of the biggest study to address lung-cancer screening.
The next question is whether the screening leads to fewer deaths. An answer is still several years away.
More than 172,000 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer – the nation’s top cancer killer – this year.
Most will die within two years because the stealth cancer almost always is diagnosed at advanced stages. If lung tumors are caught early, five-year survival skyrockets, but there is no proven early-screening method.
Studies during the 1970s concluded that X-ray screening didn’t save lives, either because it didn’t catch the deadliest tumors soon enough or it put patients with slow-growing tumors through risky treatments.
In the new study, of 77,000 people screened, 5,991 X-rays detected something suspicious. Of those, only 126 were diagnosed with lung cancer, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
