Lung cancer screening is likely to be cost-effective, particularly if it also identifies other tobacco-related conditions in high-risk people, suggests new research published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO).
Lung cancer screening is likely to be cost-effective, particularly if it also identifies other tobacco-related conditions in high-risk people, suggests new research published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO).
The authors of the study, a multidisciplinary team from Canada, suggest that combining CT screening for multiple conditions with efforts to stop smoking and manage the treatment of non-cancer heart and lung disease could make screening even more cost-effective.
Lung cancer affects millions of families around the world, and treatment is becoming more and more expensive. Healthcare systems are struggling to afford the drugs and give people access to new cancer medicines, so prevention and early detection are increasingly important. By diagnosing smoking-related diseases early on, it could be possible to improve people’s lives, both in length and in quality, more affordably. However, there are currently no national lung cancer screening programs in place, because there was little evidence that the benefit in terms of life improvement would outweigh the financial cost.
The new research shows that large-scale lung cancer screening programs could be economically viable if they targeted high-risk people and were also used to identify non-cancer conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Read more at Elsevier
Photo credit: James Heilman, MD via Wikimedia Commons
