Should You Be Screened?

Assess your lung cancer risk.

By Lisa Collier Cool
From Reader's Digest
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Consider screening if you're 50 or older, and have smoked a pack a day for at least ten years, or two packs a day for at least five years -- even if you have now quit
By the time lung cancer symptoms strike (these include persistent cough, unexplained fever, weight loss, hoarseness, bloody phlegm and shortness of breath), the disease is usually so advanced that 85 percent of patients die within five years of diagnosis. But now it can be detected early, according to a February 2006 multicenter study. Of 28,689 symptom-free men and women screened with a spiral CT lung scan, most of those diagnosed with lung cancer (464 patients) had small, highly treatable tumors that hadn't spread outside the lung.

"The only question that needs answering is exactly how many lives will be saved," says Claudia Henschke, MD, the study's lead author. "Perhaps it might be as much as 50 percent." However, lung scans, which cost about $300 each, can also pick up harmless abnormalities, causing healthy people needless alarm.

So who should get tested? "Consider screening if you're 50 or older, and have smoked a pack a day for at least ten years, or two packs a day for at least five years -- even if you have now quit," says Dr. Henschke. For more information, go to ielcap.org, the site of the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program.
From Reader's Digest - July 2006
 
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