According to new guidelines released Tuesday by a government-backed panel of health experts, more people with a long history of smoking should be tested for lung cancer every year, even if they’ve quit in recent years.
The US Task Force Preventive Services regularly reviews and guides preventive health care in the country. Although officially a government agency, their guidelines are prepared by relevant third-party experts who are engaged on a voluntary basis. On Tuesday, the agency’s experts issued new guidelines for lung cancer screening, which were too published in the medical journal JAMA.
The recommendations call for people between the ages of 50 and 80 with at least 20 pack years of smoking to be screened annually for lung cancer. A pack year is defined as the equivalent of a pack – containing 20 cigarettes – smoked per day for a year. People who have smoked so much but have since quit are still advised to get screened as long as they have quit in the past 15 years. Those who stopped more than 15 years ago or who have conditions that affect their life expectancy or willingness to undergo lung surgery are not recommended for screening.
The USPTF’s recommendations aren’t just polite advice; they have a major impact on insurance coverage, meaning more Americans should now be eligible for lung cancer research through their current health plans.
The new guidelines are more comprehensive than the most recent set, which was released in 2013. The previous version called for screening of people aged 55 to 80 with 30 pack years of smoking. According to the USPTF authors, new evidence has since shown the likely benefits of earlier screening for people with a lighter smoking history. A modeling study also published in JAMA on Tuesday, found it that this new criterion would prevent more lung cancer deaths in the long term compared to the previous guidelines, with little collateral damage.
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The study modeled what would happen if everyone who was eligible and born in 1960 was screened for lung cancer via a low-dose CT scan, the standard screening test. The new guidelines were expected to prevent 503 deaths per 100,000 people screened, compared to 381 preventable deaths per 100,000 under the old criteria.
Importantly, the new guidelines can also help narrow certain gaps in cancer care. While smoking remains the leading risk factor for lung cancer, the incidence of lung cancer among Black Americans is higher than other racial groups, and that is thought that black and Native Americans are more at risk for lung cancer with lower levels of smoking. Women can also be screened more now, as they generally smoke less on average than men.
“According to our analyzes, the new recommendations will reduce differences in lung cancer eligibility by gender and race, which will hopefully result in a reduction in lung cancer differences in the US,” Rafael Meza, associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Michigan. Public Health who led the new modeling study published in JAMA, said in a report pronunciation released by the university.
Currently, lung cancer is the second most common cancer in the US, accounting for more than 200,000 confirmed cases per year. And while the number of deaths from lung cancer has steadily declined over the decades, it is still the leading cause of death from cancer in the U.S. This year there are approximately 131,880 Americans expected to die from it.