News — Cleveland Clinic expert is available to discuss .
According to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer is the 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.
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