Source: New York Times
Doctor Conant’s Comments: HIV-positive patients, especially those with a prior history of heavy smoking of cigarettes and or marijuana should request an annual CT scan of their chest by their primary care physician each year to detect early lung cancer.
This is a change and a major advance.
WASHINGTON — Annual CT scans of current and former heavy smokers reduced their risk of death from lung cancer by 20 percent, a huge government-financed study has found. Even more surprising, the scans seem to reduce the risks of death from other causes as well, suggesting that the scans could be catching other illnesses.
The findings represent an enormous advance in cancer detection that could potentially save thousands of lives annually, although at considerable expense. Lung cancer will claim about 157,000 lives this year, more than the deaths from colorectal, breast, pancreatic and prostate cancers combined. Most patients discover their disease too late for treatment, and 85 percent die from it.
No screening method had proved effective at reducing mortality from the disease. Four randomized controlled trials done during the 1970s showed that chest X-rays, while they helped catch cancers at an earlier stage, had no effect on overall death rates. Since then, researchers have suggested that CT scans — which use coordinated X-rays to provide three-dimensional views — could detect lung tumors at an even earlier stage than X-rays.
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