Newswise — Cleveland Clinic expert is available to discuss research published in Cancer Discovery.
According to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer is the number-one cancer killer of both men and women in the United States, accounting for over 125,000 deaths per year in the US.
Annual screening for lung cancer among high-risk individuals is highly effective at detecting early-stage cancer, but lung cancer screening has poor adoption. Estimated rates of lung screening annually range from 5% to 10% - lower than for other recommended cancer screenings.
Some barriers to screening might be ameliorated if there were a blood-based screening test for lung cancer that could be employed among eligible individuals who were not being screened routinely with low-dose computed tomography (LDCT). The proposed lung cancer early detection blood test would be an initial evaluation tool that when positive would be followed by a screening LDCT.
We conducted a prospective case-control study among 958 individuals eligible for lung cancer screening to develop a blood-based lung cancer detection test.
The result was an overall sensitivity greater than 80%, meaning the test correctly detected the disease when it was present more than 80% of the time. This is a strong indication that the approach would meet the sensitivity target in clinical validation.
At even modest rates of adoption of a blood-based test, such as 10% rising to 25% within five years, meaningful reductions in late-stage diagnoses and deaths from lung cancer would be observed.
First author bio page: Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH | Cleveland Clinic
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