CT Scans May Not Lower Lung Cancer Death Rate

New findings are at odds with those of an earlier trial, however.

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Tuesday, March 6, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

TUESDAY, March 6 (HealthDay News) -- CT scans for lung cancer may increase the rate of diagnosis and treatment of the disease, but they may not help lower the numbers of patients with advanced lung malignancies or related deaths.

So concludes a new study in the March 7 Journal of the American Medical Association. The new findings are in contrast to an earlier trial, the International Early Action Lung Cancer Program (I- ELCAP), which indicated that spiral CT screening could prevent 80 percent of lung cancer deaths.

The authors of that study had argued that a large randomized trial of CT screening be stopped, because the effectiveness of the method had already been proven.

The authors of the new study disagree.

"We believe this method is not proven and should not be used broadly until a definitive randomized trial has been completed. That's in progress and won't be finished until 2009," said Colin B. Begg, senior author of the study and chairman of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The upcoming trial "is an extremely well- funded study which should settle this question once and for all," he said.

Another expert agreed that more and better study is needed.

"It's an important issue, because lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer, and our ability to do much about it, unless it's caught very early, is very bad. So early detection is a big deal," said Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association.

"But you just have to study each proposal, because you never know exactly how it's going to work out," he added. "It's only a real-life study [such as the currently ongoing National Cancer Institute trial] that can solve the issue."

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths. Because of a lack of adequate detection methods, malignancies are often diagnosed at an advanced stage, limiting treatment. While the five-year survival rate among patients with stage I lung cancer is about 70 percent, it is only 5 percent among those with stage IV disease. Unfortunately, stage I lung cancer diagnoses are rare.