A major study by the National Health Service has found that thousands of lives could be saved if people at risk for Britain’s deadliest cancer were screened for diagnosis before it became incurable.
It shows that giving smokers and ex-smokers a CT scan detects carcinomas in the lung when they are at an early enough stage that they can still be removed, rather than continuing to go undetected.
Experts are calling for the government to take steps to perform routine CT scans of smokers and ex-smokers to reduce the massive number of lung cancer deaths. Around 48,000 people are diagnosed with the disease annually in the UK and 35,100 people die from it, 96 per day.
Lung cancer is a particularly brutal form of cancer because it is difficult to detect and three out of four cases are diagnosed at stage three or four, when it is too late to offer life-saving treatment.
However the Study the summitThe NHS Trust, led by disease specialists from University College London, offers real hope that lung cancer could become an early-caught condition.
The CT scan means that 70% of the growths detected in people’s lungs were identified when the disease was in its first or second stage, a massive increase in the usual rate of early diagnosis.
“It’s really a breakthrough for lung cancer,” Dr. Sam Guiness of the University of California, Los Angeles, the trial’s principal investigator, told The Guardian. Lung cancer had nothing to allow us to detect this devastating cancer early and provide curative treatment to this number of lung cancer patients. “
“It is important to show how effective CT scans are. At my lung cancer clinic at UCLA, seven out of ten people have had incurable and incurable cancer since the first time they saw a doctor. Whereas, with cancers that are incurable. Seeing it at Summit, seven out of 10 are likely curable, because it was discovered earlier.
“We have many, many patients who cannot believe their luck in being involved because they had tests done, a lump was discovered – early cancer – and then they had surgery. People are discharged from the hospital in three to five days and can return to work or their normal routine in six. “This has prevented them from seeing a doctor, perhaps after 18 months with a cancer that has spread and that it is often incurable. “
Guinness and his team found 180 cases of lung cancer among 12,100 smokers and ex-smokers aged 55 to 78 in north-central and north-east London, many of them from poor backgrounds. They volunteered to undergo what he called a “lung health check” when they received an invitation letter from their GP. Of these, 70% were detected when they were still in their first or second stage.
Experts say the results show that the government must move to routine screening of smokers and ex-smokers to reduce the terrible death toll from the disease.
“Now that CT lung cancer screening has been shown to work, we are very hopeful that the lung cancer screening program will be introduced in England,” said Dr. Robert Rintoll, Director of the Clinical Consulting Group at UK Lung Cancer Alliance, A group of leading disease experts and patient charities.
“Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the UK and early detection offers the best chance of curative treatment and saving more lives.” She added that screening could lead to a 25% reduction in the number of men dying from lung cancer and 30 to 40% fewer among women.
“The summit study will teach us more about how to successfully implement computed tomography in a high-risk population,” said Rentoll.
Summit’s findings will be published in a medical journal later this year. They will add to the mounting pressure on the UK’s National Screening Committee to get screened for lung cancer, at least among smokers or accustomers, in the same way that certain people are already being invited. age groups for breast, bowel, and cervical cancer exams. Previous studies in the United States and Europe have also shown that a CT scan can detect lung cancers that would otherwise have been hidden.
The bleak scenario involved in lung cancer is often emphasized Cancer The British Research Foundation found that “survival from lung cancer has not improved much in the last 40 years in the UK.” Only 16% of patients live up to five years after diagnosis and only 10% to 10 years.
The proportion of patients diagnosed in the first or second stage. From 19.5% in 2013 to 29% in 2019. However, one in three is diagnosed only as an emergency, for example, when someone attends the ER, and 87% of those cases are already in their third or fourth stage.
NHS England is conducting small-scale trials in which people, usually in poor areas where smoking rates are high, have the opportunity to have a CT scan to check their lungs, using a scanner on the back of a truck in the parking lot sometimes of a supermarket. .
An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS has introduced lung cancer screening vans into supermarket parking lots to screen people at high risk for lung cancer and early detection of cancers has remained a priority throughout epidemic with 200,940 people referred for detection only in December ”.
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