New website seeks to spread the word about EarlyCDT®-Lung among medical professionals
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.
On the site, medical professionals have access to a variety of materials and information, including a blog written by two authorities in cancer detection and treatment, a guide to lung cancer risk assessment, a cost of smoking calculator, video galleries, an interactive presentation showing viewers the stages of lung cancer and much more.
EarlyCDT-Lung is a true breakthrough in the effort to detect lung cancer at an early stage. The need for such a tool is pressing, given that only about 15 percent of lung cancers are detected before they have reached an advanced stage. Lung cancer symptoms tend to appear only when the disease is advanced and the five-year survival rate is only about 5 percent.
The website goes into much more detail, but for the purposes of this post, EarlyCDT-Lung measures specific autoantibodies (immuno-biomarkers). These autoantibodies (AAbs) are present and elevated in patients whose lung cancer is in its very early stages. Therefore, the AAbs can help physicians detect lung cancer before symptoms occur and when treatment is much more likely to be successful.
For too long, lung cancer has been relatively ignored. This situation could be the result of a stigma the disease still carries in some quarters. It is only recently that a concerted effort to develop a reliable method for lung cancer detection has been undertaken. Studies have determined that x-rays, the standard detection tool until now, are not effective. EarlyCDT-Lung, used in conjunction with other methods, such as CT scans, could change the lives of thousands of people every year.
Clearly, EarlyCDT-Lung deserves to be better known and more often used. EarlyCDT-Lung.com is designed to achieve these objectives.