Blog: Let's Talk about EarlyCDT-Lung

The bad news about lung cancer is that, when symptoms appear, the disease has progressed to late stage. Late-stage lung cancer has a five-year survival rate of only about 15 percent.  Most current lung cancer detection methods being less than completely reliable does not help.

It is well known that early detection is the most powerful weapon against life-threatening cancers. This is particularly true for lung cancer. If lung cancer can be detected at Stage 1 or 2, the chance of survival five years out can be more than 50 percent. However that is not the case for most cases, and the current chance of survival beyond five years is about 15 percent.

The world lost two well-known entertainers this past spring: disco queen Donna Summer and Emmy-winning actor Kathryn Joosten. Both women died of lung cancer. Both had been smokers.

It is true that the vast majority of lung cancers occur in people who are or have been smokers. But what defines a dangerous level of smoking? Is it a pack a day? Two packs? A half a pack?

Before anything else is said, it should be noted that lung cancer kills more people each year than the next four largest cancer killers combined. With this fact established, there is good and bad news on the lung cancer front, not only in terms of the rates at which people are diagnosed, but also regarding that most important way to lower death rates (besides not smoking) – early lung cancer detection.

Medical News Today reports that lung cancer among women in the United Kingdom is still rising. On the other hand, HealthDay, an online publication of U.S. News, points out that lung cancer rates among women in the United States are declining, and rates among men continue a retreat that has been going on for some years now.

According to the Medical News Today story, between 1975 and 2009, cases of lung cancer among women in the UK exploded from fewer than 8,000 to more than 18,000. Meanwhile, lung cancer cases among men in the UK have been dropping significantly. In 1975, there were 110 cases per 100,000 men. By 2009, the rate had shrunk to 58.8 per 100,000. Still, more than 23,000 men were diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK in 2009.

EarlyCDT®-Lung has made its mark in across the globe, where physicians use the simple blood test as an aid in assessment of patients at an increased risk of developing lung cancer. Recently, it was shown that improvements to the test have increased its overall accuracy to 92 percent.

In Scotland, the National Health Service has begun a study of 10,000 high-risk patients to determine whether EarlyCDT-Lung can save as much as 40,000 pounds per patient and cut the lung cancer death rate by 20 percent. Half of the patients will use EarlyCDT-Lung with follow-up CT scans. The other half will have only X-ray screening.

Given the apparent potential of EarlyCDT-Lung, it is important that more physicians become aware of it. To that end, on March 22, Oncimmune (USA), LLC launched the new and improved website, http://earlycdt-lung.com, designed specifically to address the questions and concerns of physicians and pulmonologists, according to Greg Stanley, Oncimmune’s chief commercial officer.

Lung cancer kills more people than any other kind of cancer. Additionally, tobacco smoking accounts for approximately 87 percent of lung cancer deaths.

Given these two brute facts, it seems strange that people – especially current and former smokers – are not flocking to their physician for testing. After all, most people are aware that early detection is the most effective weapon in the fight against cancer.

So why do so many people at high risk for lung cancer – especially smokers and former smokers – fail to be take advantage of available testing options for early detection?

People 50 years of age and older who have had pneumonia are recommended to have a follow-up chest x-ray to check for lung cancer. This recommendation is based on a study of 3,398 patients who were hospitalized or seen in the emergency room for pneumonia in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, between 2000 and 2002.

According to a summary published in JournalWatch, the study found the newly diagnosed lung cancer incidence after 90 days to be 1.1 percent, with only 40 percent of the patients having chest x-rays within 90 days. At one year, the incidence was 1.7 percent.

A total of 57 patients were diagnosed with lung cancer within one year. Of that number, only one was younger than 50. Another summary of the study points out that 79 of the patients in the study were diagnosed with lung cancer at five years. However, only 76 of the 79 patients were over 50 years old.

Even among some medical professionals, a stigma has been attached to people with lung cancer. The assumption – too often voiced to the lung cancer patients themselves – is that smoking has led to their disease, and it is the patient’s fault it has occurred. Even patients who have never smoked have been accused of being “closet smokers.”

As Lynne Eldridge, M.D., has pointed out that lung cancer among people who have never smoked is now seen as the sixth-leading cause of death from cancer in the United States.

These facts do not change the reality that smoking is still the number-one risk factor for lung cancer. But there are other risk factors that cannot be ignored, such as family history of cancer, exposure to secondhand smoke, other cancer-causing agents and more.

That lung cancer can occur in non-smokers is not news. Joe Paterno, the storied football coach at Pennsylvania State University, is a case in point. Coach Paterno died of small-cell carcinoma on January 22, 2012.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting on Paterno’s death, quotes oncologist Barbara Campling from the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. “It’s extremely rare to have small-cell cancer in a nonsmoker,” Campling says. About 13 percent of lung cancers are small-cell carcinomas, Campling continues. However, these cancers usually occur in current smokers or people who have been heavy smokers in the past.