Posted: Friday, June 17, 2022
There has been a significant overall decline in the rate of advanced lung cancer diagnoses since the implementation of low-dose chest CT screening. Maxwell Oluwoe Akanbi, MD, PhD, MS, of McLaren Flint, Michigan, presented data on behalf of his colleagues highlighting the benefit of this screening at the 2022 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting (Abstract 10506).
“Our study shows the overall benefit of low-dose chest CT in marginalized communities. However, the impact of our findings on lung cancer mortality will still need further study,” concluded the authors.
Researchers used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database to identify more than 400,000 individuals between the ages of 55 and 80 who had been diagnosed with regional or metastatic lung cancer between 2004 and 2018. Patients were split into two groups based on the year of diagnosis: before low-dose chest CT (2004–2014) and after low-dose chest CT (2015–2018). The age-adjusted incidence rates of advanced lung cancer were compared between these two groups.
The age-adjusted incidence rate of advanced lung cancer was 7.6 per 100,000 person-years in the period after low-dose CT compared with 4.5 per 100,000 person-years in the prescreening era (41% decline, P < .01). Female patients had a more accelerated decline in lung cancer incidence (53%) compared with male patients (30%). When racial subgroups were compared, the rate of advanced lung cancer diagnoses declined most rapidly among non-Hispanic Black patients (55%), and Hispanic patients had the slowest rate of decline (41%). Patients who lived in rural areas had a 69% decline in the age-adjusted incidence rate of advanced lung cancer in the years during which screening was conducted, whereas those living in metropolitan areas had a 37% decline in advanced lung cancers.
Disclosure: For a full list of authors’ disclosures, visit coi.asco.org.