The American Cancer Society recently revised its lung cancer screening guidelines to recommend that doctors discuss low-dose computed tomography (CT) lung screening exams with their high-risk cancer patients, the society announced on its website.
 
ACS based its new recommendation on results of a study showing that heavy smokers who get such screenings have a 20% lower chance of dying from lung cancer than those who got chest X-rays. The study was published online Feb. 25 in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal that ACS publishes.
 
In the report, researchers looked at data from the National Lung Screening Trial, including more than 50,000 people aged 55 to 74 who were current or former smokers with at least a 30 pack-year history of smoking (that works out to a pack a day for 30 years or two packs a day for 15 years, ACS says). There are about 8.5 million Americans that fit that description, ACS says.
 
About 12,000 lung cancer deaths could be delayed or prevented each year with regular low-dose CT screenings of those patients, the ACS researchers estimate.
 
Still, there are downsides to doing annual CT screenings on heavy smokers, ACS concedes. As well as early signs of cancer, the scans tend to pick up other abnormalities that turn out not to be cancer, but which can prompt other more invasive and expensive tests.
 
Then there’s the matter of cost (CT scans can run $500 to $1,500, according to Reuters), and whether there would even be enough imaging centers to handle all those high-risk patients, presuming all of them decided to get screened.
 
Best preventive: just quit. But you knew that already, didn’t you?