The objective of this pilot study coordinated by the Public Assistance of Paris Hospitals (AP-HP) is to detect lung cancer before the appearance of symptoms.
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This study, called “cascade study”, is aimed at women who are smokers or ex-smokers, aged over 50. In a press release dated Friday, March 8, the AP-HP indicates that there is still room for 600 women volunteers for this pilot lung cancer screening using low-dose CT.
You do not have to live in Paris to participate, but you must be between 50 and 74 years old, and be a smoker or have been a smoker for at least 20 years at an average of one pack per day. Low-dose scanner technology, more precise than x-rays, makes it possible to identify very small tumors early, explains Professor Marie Pierre Revel, the main instigator of the study. Small tumors which can then be removed by radiation or surgery. The system, launched almost two years ago, has already made it possible to detect around thirty cancers without symptoms, in women who were therefore able to be treated in time. The other objective of this “cascade” study remains to test the contribution of artificial intelligence, to help doctors in reading the results.
A cancer with a poor prognosis
This pilot study is only aimed at women, because women remain under-represented in large international lung cancer screening studies. Another similar pilot screening study is to be launched soon by INCA, the national cancer institute. It will be done on a larger scale and will also be offered to men for a period of five years. The objective of this work is to ultimately lead to the establishment of generalized lung cancer screening for former smokers. Lung cancer causes the most deaths each year in France.
Often diagnosed at a late stage, it is a cancer with a poor prognosis which causes more than 33,000 deaths per year in France. The mortality rate has been falling among men for 30 years, but it is increasing among women, due to the increase in female smoking in the 1970s. For equivalent tobacco consumption, women have a higher rate of cancer of the lung two to three times higher than that of men.
