November is a month rich in health prevention campaigns. It’s “No Tobacco Month” (the opportunity, if necessary, to test your addiction to cigarettes or better, to get rid of it), it’s also Movember, a global health awareness campaign men (who in support grow a mustache) more particularly around prostate cancer and testicular cancer, mental health and suicide prevention.
Finally, November is also Perle, which focuses on lung cancer and even more this year on screening.
Screening for lung cancer would significantly increase the number of patients treated early and reduce mortality by around 24% in men and 48% in women.
As a reminder, lung cancer is 50,000 new cases every year in France and often late diagnoses (at the metastatic stage) because the disease initially develops without symptoms.
Only 15% of lung cancers are diagnosed at an early stage according to the latest figures available.
If new treatments (which we told you about here) clearly improve survival and chances of recoverymany voices are being raised to demand targeted screening, in other words screening of people most at risk.
This is in particular the credo of the Ensemble Nous Poumons Collective which is launching an appeal on the occasion of this awareness month.
Lung cancer: the challenge of early diagnosis
« Like all the members of the Ensemble Nous Poumons Collective, I remain mobilized on the issue of individual screening for lung cancer before organized screening is deployed in France, as is already the case for some of the our European neighbors (Germany or Poland, Editor’s note). Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in our country,” explains Professor Sébastien Couraud, Head of the pulmonology department at Lyon University Hospital.
Targeted screening which would make it possible to detect cancers at an early stage and therefore “to reduce mortality by around 24% among men and 48% among women.”
Who should get tested?
Several projects are currently underway to determine the targeted screening protocol which could be implemented in the coming months, knowing that the National Cancer Institute (INCa) should submit its copy very soon.
In the meantime, learned societies recommend screening for people most at risk of developing lung cancer. We suspect it, smokers therefore.
But not just any ones. To integrate the early detection protocol, it will be necessary to:
- Be aged 50 to 74
- Have smoked 10 cigarettes/day for more than 30 years or more than 15 cigarettes/day for more than 25 years;
- Whether smoking is active or stopped for less than 10 years.
Which test to detect lung cancer early?
One of the possible obstacles to screening was the (potential) toxicity of screening examinations (contrast products for example, which we told you about here). This brake has been lifted since the High Authority of Health has decided in favor of low-dose non-injected scanner.
The Cascade study currently underway in several hospitals will also be able to refine this treatment in order to provide the National Cancer Institute with “essential information on how scanners are read (single or double, role of artificial intelligence)”, we learn on the Paris Hospitals website.
“As part of lung cancer screening, a low-dose CT scan should be performed one year apart for the first two exams, then every two years after two negative exams and in the absence of emphysema or broncho- chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)”, specifies the Collectif Ensemble Nous Poumons.
