Lung cancer screening may do more harm than good

It’s difficult to imagine how cancer screening could lead to harm, but efforts to screen for cancer often lead to unnecessary treatment. When fear dominates in the cancer patient’s mind, cancer patients may impulsively opt for treatment that may be of little or no benefit. The recent fan-fare is for CT scans that can detect tumors in the lungs and other organs when tumors are smaller and before they cause symptoms. However, CT scans may not reduce mortality rates. CT scans detect more cancer at an early stage, but that doesn’t mean treatment is any more effective and most patients will succumb to cancer on the same calendar day. The earlier detection of lung cancer just adds more days between the date of first diagnosis and the date when the patient passes away. Early detection of lung cancer unfortunately does not reduce the number of patients that go on to develop advanced cancer. Early detection with CT scans does increase the amount of treatment that is performed, by 10 times, and since surgery has its own risks (5% of patients die and another 20-40% experience serious complications), efforts to detect cancer at earlier stages may only provide an imaginary benefit. [Journal American Medical Association 297:953-61, 2007]