A doctor at the University of Virginia is the lead author of the American Cancer Society’s updated advisory on lung cancer screening, which recommends an additional 5 million people be tested for the disease, the world’s leading cause of cancer death.
Dr. Andrew Wolf said the recommendation is that people who smoked one pack of cigarettes daily for 20 years, and are between the ages of 50 and 80, undergo annual low-dose CT scans.
“We are lowering the age to start from 55, which was our initial recommendation from 2013, to 50, and then extending the age from 74, which was our initial recommendation, to age 80,” he said. “And the 20-pack years is also a reduction from our prior guideline of 30-pack years.”
Wolf and his many co-authors also made another key update: They dropped a previous recommendation that people who quit smoking 15 years ago need not be screened.
“We found in our research leading up to the guideline that the risk for developing lung cancer, while significantly lower than for those who continue to smoke, never really drops,” Wolf said. “So, if a person has smoked 20-pack years and they quit smoking, their risk of developing lung cancer compared to if they continued to smoke is significantly lower. But it never drops compared to when they quit. It just sort of plateaus and then it rises as they get older.”
