Boomer Smokers' Early Detection of Lung Cancer

It takes more lives in a year than colon, breast, liver, kidney, melanoma and prostate cancers combined. Yet there is still no definitive screening test to detect lung cancer early, when tumors are at their smallest and before the cancer has spread.

Scientists already know that chest X-rays and sputum tests don't work well for early detection. Doctors are awaiting results from a huge National Cancer Institute study to find out whether the answer might be spiral CT scans, in which images are made all around the patient's body, allowing a 3-D model of the lungs to be constructed.

But, so far, nothing has been proven to find lung cancer early enough to save a significant number of lives, the measure by which most medical screening tests are judged to be effective. Cigarette smoking dramatically increases the risk of lung cancer, but a significant number of people who have never smoked do get the disease.

Plus, about one-fourth of people with early lung cancer don't have symptoms. For many, the disease is diagnosed when they get a chest X-ray for some other reason, but by then the disease may be well advanced.

Lung cancer deaths have declined along with smoking rates.  But even so, the American Cancer Society says the disease will kill more than 157,000 Americans this year.

A blood test

The overall survival rate for the most common type of lung cancer is 15 percent, five years after diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  If found early, when the tumor is about an inch in size and has not spread outside the lung, survival is 60 to 80 percent.

But most lung cancer is found after it has spread. So the announcement of EarlyCDT-Lung, a $475 blood test to detect lung cancer early, was exciting to many.  It was launched last year through more than 400 physicians' offices in the Midwest and Southeast, but patients can buy it online from the manufacturer, Oncimmune, and ask their doctor to draw blood and send the whole thing back to the company's laboratory in De Soto, Kan.  It hasn't received FDA approval, Oncimmune says, because as a laboratory-developed test, it doesn't need it.

Source: Saint Petersburg Times, July 29, 2010