Lung Cancer Study
Since 1999, Dr. Henschke has asserted that annual CT scans of smokers and former smokers would detect lung cancer when tumors are small enough to be cured, preventing as many as 80 percent of the 160,000 deaths a year from lung cancer, by far the biggest cause of cancer deaths in the United States.
Her 2006 study said that, after screening 31,567 people from seven countries, CT scans uncovered 484 lung cancers, 412 of them at a very early stage. Three years later, most of those patients were still alive, and she projected that 80 percent would be alive after 10 years and assumed that they would have died without the screens.
Critics question both her survival projections and her assumption that all would have died without screening. Indeed, most in the cancer establishment say that Dr. Henschke has yet to prove her case. CT scans have radiation risks and sometimes detect cancers that would not have progressed, leading to risky procedures like biopsies and lung surgery when not needed.
To settle the dispute, the National Cancer Institute started in 2002 the $200 million National Lung Screening Trial comparing death rates among 55,000 people randomly assigned to have CT scans or chest X-rays. Results are not expected until 2010. Dr. Henschke has asserted that allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die in the meantime is unethical.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Research, Early Detection, Other News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.