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Growing Endorsement of Chest CT Screening for Lung Cancer: Why Aren’t We Doing It?
I just did a brief video for Swedish Medical Center on the issue of low dose CT screening for lung cancer, which has been proven to improve survival. Though Dr. Otis Brawley, Chief Medical Officer of the American Cancer Society, just wrote a book about the risk of over-diagnosis of cancer, the ACS has just officially endorsed lung cancer screening, recognizing its value.
The only problem is that it really isn’t being done. I discuss a bit on the resistance to screening here:
Why shouldn’t we do screening for lung cancer on everyone?
A post on About.com makes the case that screening the higher risk population of just those people 55-75 with a significant smoking history, as was done in the influential National Lung Cancer Screening Trial (NLST) published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, would miss nearly 3 of 4 lung cancers even as this effort improves lung cancer survival by 20% in the screened population. This piece implies that broader screening across of a wider range of ages and smoking history would be appropriate in order to detect more lung cancer and improve outcomes. So let me make two points.
1) I am a proponent of lung cancer screening for an appropriate population and think it’s underutilized now.
2) It is categorically incorrect to presume that broadening screening to a wider population will lead to better outcomes.
Why?
Dr. Weiss’s “Highlights in Lung Cancer, 2011″: CT Screening & Optimal Management of Elderly Patients with Advanced NSCLC
This is the third and final part of Dr. Weiss’s presentation on “Highlights in Lung Cancer, 2011″. After focusing on developments in relatively narrow subpopulations with distinct molecular markers in the first two parts of his webinar, Dr. Weiss closed with his coverage of a couple of issues with broader applicability: the new data supporting CT screening for higher risk people with a significant smoking history, and also some new data addressing the question of whether elderly patients are best served by receiving single agent or doublet chemotherapy.
Below you’ll find the podcast of the program in audio and video formats, as well as the transcript and figures for this activity.
Dr. Weiss Highlights in Lung Cancer 2011, Pt. 3 CT Screening and LC in Elderly Audio Podcast
Dr. Weiss Highlights in Lung Cancer 2011, Pt. 3 CT Screening and LC in Elderly Transcript
Dr Weiss Highlights in Lung Cancer 2011, Pt. 3 CT Screening and LC in Elderly Figs
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:57 — 40.8MB) | Embed
Tips and Tools on Smoking Cessation, by Dr. Mark Millard
This long-overdue podcast by Dr. Mark Millard, Medical Director of the Baylor Martha Foster Lung Care Center and Professor of Pulmonology at Baylor University in Dallas, TX, focuses on many aspects of smoking cessation: how physicians can effectively discuss it with patients, how anyone can discuss the issue constructively with a smoker, and how someone motivated to quit can use a wide range of tools — both behavioral and medical — to optimize their chance of quitting for good.
Here are the audio and video versions of the podcast, along with the transcript and figures for the program.
Dr. Millard Tips and Tools for Smoking Cessation Audio Podcast
Dr. Millard Tips and Tools for Smoking Cessation Transcript
Dr. Millard Tips and Tools for Smoking Cessation Figures
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:50 — 69.3MB) | Embed
Capitalizing on a “Teachable Moment”: Lung Cancer Screening, Smoking Cessation, and Cost-Effectiveness
The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), a protocol with over 50,000 former or current smokers between ages 55 and 75, justifiably became a major news story when the results demonstrated a significant improvement in lung cancer-specific and all-cause mortality of 20% and 6.7%, respectively. However, now even a year after the initial press releases about the positive results and several months after its publication in the New England Journal of Medicine (marking it as a practice-changing finding), CT screening for lung cancer hasn’t yet become routine practice. Why not? In contrast with screening results in breast or colon cancer, where positive results have led to a change in policy, the cost of implementing a broad screening policy today entails a public debate about the feasibility, which largely centers around costs.
In this context, a paper by McMahon and colleagues in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology provides a valuable analysis. The authors created a data-based simulation of cohorts of men and women of ages 50, 60, and 70 (six distinct cohorts) with a significant smoking history that would reflect the range of patients included in a screening program instituted based on the NLST. Calculating results based on the data from this simulation, they then analyzed the cost-effectiveness in the common term for this measurement of “costs per quality-adjusted life-year gained ($/QALY)” (essentially, how much does it cost to improve one person’s life by a year of functional, “good” time?) for these cohorts when modeling estimated outcomes for CT screening, smoking cessation interventions (with a range of abstinence ranging from 4 to 30% at one year), and a combination of these two approaches.
The National Lung Screening Trial: Results are in
The much-anticipated manuscript from the NCI-sponsored National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) was just published on line in the New England Journal of Medicine, with an editorial by Dr. Harold Sox. As Dr. West outlined in a previous post, we’ve known since last year that this trial demonstrated an improvement in lung-cancer specific survival with low-dose spiral CT screening of high-risk individuals. However, we have not had access to the details of this study until now. One of the fundamental problems we face is that lung cancer is most often diagnosed in an advanced stage. This has generated intense interest in screening and early detection. However until this trial, no screening test has been shown to reduce the risk from dying from lung cancer, which is the benchmark we use to judge the effectiveness of any screening modality. As the first trial that shows lung cancer screening can save lives, the NLST will no doubt have a significant impact on how we practice in this country and should be viewed as a very hopeful result for lung cancer advocates. However, many questions remain and as is the case with any medical intervention, individuals considering low dose CT screening will need to weigh not only the potential benefit (as defined for the first time by this trial), but also the potential risks associated with this approach. The NLST will go a long way towards informing this decision.
Lung Cancer Screening Saves Lives!
For years and years, lung cancer advocates have often aggressively championed screening for lung cancer, while many in the medical “establishment” and policy-makers expressed reservations that, while there were encouraging indicators of benefit, there was not evidence that lung cancer screening saves lives, so we really couldn’t make a blanket statement encouraging lung cancer screening. That has now changed, as the NCI-sponsored National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) has now been reported to demonstrate a 20% improvement in lung cancer-specific survival. A preliminary but detailed manuscript describing the trial itself is published in the journal Radiology and is available at no charge.
The trial was started in 2002 and randomized over 53,000 patients who were 55-75 and had at least a 30 pack-year smoking history (pack-years being the product of average number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day x number of years smoking) to either annual low-dose spiral CT scans for three consecutive years or a chest x-ray on the same interval. These screening CT scans are done without IV contrast and are done within a single breath hold (up to 15 seconds) but can fully view the lung fields.
The Data Safety Monitoring Committee that regualrly reviews the trial results over the course of a study’s ongoing conduct recently reviewed the most current results and noted a statistically significant improvement in the lung cancer-specific survival of people were were randomized to screening CT scans. Specifically, there were 354 deaths from lung cancer on the CT arm, vs. 442 deaths from lung cancer on the arm assigned to chest x-rays, a 20.3% reduction. In addition, the CT screened patients had a 7% reduction in “all cause mortality” (not just lung cancer, but deaths for any reason), with only 25% of the deaths in the overall trial due to lung cancer. This was likely due to detection of issues such as cardiovascular disease and other incidental but significant medical problems with CT but not chest x-ray screening.
Dr. Kristin Manning: Introduction to Imaging for Lung Cancer
A radiologist, the person who specializes in reviewing imaging studies in medicine, is often someone you notice if they’re unusually bad or unusually good. They perform a service and you presume that they’re good at it, but a few are so sharp that the other doctors they work with notice it at every tumor board discussion or one on one exchange.
Dr. Manning is one of those special radiologists. She had trained at the University of Washington while I was completing my medical oncology training there, and when she left to join Seattle Radiology, a private group based at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, I was among the many doctors who felt the body blow of losing her talent. On the other hand, when I later joined the medical oncology group at Swedish, I was very happy to have the opportunity to be reunited with her.
But talk is cheap, so I’ll also add that when I developed a cough that lasted for months a few years ago, and one of the thoracic surgeons I work with said I needed to get a chest CT to check it out (as I joked that his practice was slow and that he was trying to drum up business), it was Dr. Manning who read my own scans for me (and fortunately, they were OK).
She remains a terrific resource, and one too valuable to not share with others. She was kind enough to sit down with me for a discussion of current issues in imaging, with a particular focus on issues related to lung cancer. Here’s the first part of our discussion, which covers a bit on screening, the issues related to assessing and following lung nodules, and some basics of the work-up and ongoing follow-up of patients with lung cancer. Below you’ll find the audio and video versions of the podcast, the transcript, and a copy of the very few figures associated with the audio component:
dr-manning-imaging-intro-part-1-audio-podcast
dr-manning-imaging-intro-part-1-transcript
dr-manning-imaging-intro-part-1-figures
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.3KB) | Embed
Lung Cancer Screening: Dr. West shouldn’t be the only one with a bulls-eye on his chest (and no, I don’t torture puppies either)
On March 24, 2009, Dr. West wrote,
Lung cancer screening is one of my least favorite topics to discuss because it’s probably one of the biggest areas where there is a gulf between the medical establishment’s party line and the expectations of many patients and advocates. I tackled a discussion of screening a few years ago that included the anticipated benefits as well as the challenges with LC screening (nowadays really focusing on low dose, spiral CT). That was probably about the most frustrating topic I’ve pursued, initially heralded after my post on the arguments in favor of screening, but feeling like I was being vilified as a kitten torturer in the responses I received after my post about the thorny issues with it.
Dr. West’s last post is relevant to the conversation that member cards7up and I have been having on the discussion thread from my piece on November 30, 2009. The gist of the conversation is about whether to screen, and if so, how to do it.
On the “if” question, I consider my father’s desire for pan-scans to look for occult cancer (he quit smoking about 20 years ago). Every now and again, he hears on the radio ads for commercial enterprises offering pan-scans for a fee to screen for cancer. Even though he can afford it, I don’t let him go—I feel that he’s more likely to be harmed by the test than helped. Dr. West addressed this issue in his discussion about PSA and prostate cancer:
But last week, the story emerged that PSA screening for prostate cancer appears to provide somewhere between little and no survival benefit for men. One large trial suggested a very small benefit, in which nearly 50 patients would need to be treated to save the life of one from prostate cancer, and another trial didn’t show a survival benefit. After lung cancer, prostate cancer is the next most common focus of my practice, and I can assure you that I find this very easy to believe. I see many men who are exceptionally likely to do well, begging the question of whether they underwent surgery or radiation or some other alternative for no benefit, but who have had a permanent compromise of their sexual function, urinary continence, and other issues important to their quality of life (and I probably see only a small minority of the patients who are exceptionally likely to do well and never even see an oncologist). I also see men with prostate cancer who undergo aggressive treatments for prostate cancer but have a virulent enough cancer that even screening efforts and timely, aggressive interventions can’t save them from their cancer. In between, the numbers suggest one in 50 men may be saved from a truly life-threatening cancer.
PSA Screening and Cancer Screening in General: Questioning a Sacred Cow
Lung cancer screening is one of my least favorite topics to discuss because it’s probably one of the biggest areas where there is a gulf between the medical establishment’s party line and the expectations of many patients and advocates. I tackled a discussion of screening a few years ago that included the anticipated benefits as well as the challenges with LC screening (nowadays really focusing on low dose, spiral CT). That was probably about the most frustrating topic I’ve pursued, initially heralded after my post on the arguments in favor of screening, but feeling like I was being vilified as a kitten torturer in the responses I received after my post about the thorny issues with it.
There is no doubt that LC screening is an important issue, and it has become one of the most central causes for many non-profits in the LC world. I think that it’s an easily identifiable, understandable issue that provides a tangible thing to do that can give people a sense of control in an otherwise largely uncontrollable situation.
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