This Test Can Save the Life of a Long Time Smoker

Posted by Mike Shaw on December 1st, 2020

There is a test called the CT lung cancer screening that could save the lives of tens of thousands of different smokers every year.

For example, a 58-year-old patient smoked cigarettes for more than three decades before quitting on her 50th birthday. A few years after leaving, she had this lung cancer screening test, and the radiologist found an eight-millimetre nodule in her right lung, which turned out to be cancer. She had the tumour removed through surgical intervention, and now she is five years out from surgery with no signs of cancer.

Interested in lung cancer treatment in Australia? You are not alone. Men who currently smoke are about 23 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers, and the risk is about 13 times higher for women who smoke versus non-smokers. The best thing that smokers can do to decrease their risk of lung cancer is to quit smoking. Still, the increased risk of lung cancer does not immediately disappear but rather gradually decreases over a few decades.

Five-year survival rates for lung cancer are around 19 per cent, which is pretty low compared to most other cancers, including breast cancer and prostate cancer. Until very recently, the only highly effective way to fight mortality was smoking avoidance, but there is now a new tool for decreasing mortality rates among smokers.

CT lung cancer screening

CT stands for computed tomography, which is a sophisticated kind of X-ray imaging. When lung cancer is diagnosed early, the long term survival rate is around 70 per cent, compared to a mere 5 per cent when lung cancer has spread to other parts of the body. Research showed there was a 20 per cent mortality decrease among people who were screened by the CT test, and a more recent study in Japan showed a 51 per cent decrease in mortality.

CT scanning is not new. It was invented by a British engineer named Godfrey Hounsfield in the 1960s, and he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the invention. While standard X-ray imaging sends X-rays through the patient in only one direction, CT transmits and detects X-rays in multiple different directions, which dramatically improves imaging of the interior of the body.

Lung cancer contains abnormal cells that proliferate in an uncontrolled way and do not obey the standard signals to die. Normal lung cells become cancerous through exposure to tobacco smoke, asbestos, radon gas and airborne pollutants.

Low-dose CT has been used in recent years to screen for lung cancer. Regular chest X-rays detect lung centres when they measure centimetres in diameter, but CT tests can find lung cancers much earlier when they are only millimetres wide. Early detection is crucial to improved survival. Once lung cancer causes symptoms like weight loss, a persistent cough and coughing up blood, cancer has already reached an advanced stage. The newer CT scans use a lower dosage of X-rays to decrease the risk of causing other health issues.

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