Lung Cancer Screening Can Catch Tumors When They ’ re Curable, New Research Finds

For the past six years, Elyssa Barbaro has gotten screened for lung cancer. The 71-year-old New Yorker smoked for about 50 years, but she doubts she would have gotten an annual preventative CT scan if her pulmonologist hadn’t told her she should. Even though the procedure takes just 15 minutes, it saved her life—more than once. During her CT scans in 2019 and 2020, cancer was discovered in Barbaro’s lungs. At first, Barbaro was terrified to learn that she had cancer. But because her doctors had checked her lungs annually, and then every six months after her diagnoses, they were able to find the nodules soon after they started growing, when they were still very small. This meant the cancer could be easily removed by surgery, and that she didn’t need aggressive (and often painful) procedures to contain it, like chemotherapy and radiation. Now, Barbaro urges her friends who currently or formerly smoke to get screened. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “I know people are afraid to find out they have something wrong with them,” says Barbaro. “But for me, the far greater fear is not knowing you have something wrong with you.” Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths, and one reason why is that many patients don’t experience symptoms until the disease becomes advanced. In the U.S., only 18.6% of all lung cancer patients survive for five years, since just 16% of lung cancers are diagnosed at an early stage. But...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Cancer healthscienceclimate Wellbeing Source Type: news