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Breaking News: USPSTF Recommends annual low dose CT scan for lung cancer screening

I was reading articles this evening, when I came across this announcement and article to be published tomorrow in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The publication should come as no surprise as preliminary recommendations were published last year.

These findings are primarily based upon the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) which was published in 2011. In the NLST clinical trial, 54,000 patients considered to be high risk for lung cancer, specifically former smokers were annually screened with low dose CT scan. Although there was a relatively high rate of false POSITIVE results, meaning CT scan findings which were NOT found to be positive for cancer, there was a reduction in mortality in those patients who were screened with CT scan versus chest x-ray alone. This was the first clinical trial to ever demonstrate this benefit, as previous trials had only noted a benefit in survival, an end-point that critics would appropriately detract was susceptible to statistical bias. Although such discussion is beyond the scope of this blog, I wanted our patients to be one of the first informed, as this will likely be published in the mainstream media tomorrow.

Please find the link to the AIM article below:

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleID=1809422

Also, let me be among the first to wish you and yours a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.

Author
Dr. Christopher Ho

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