Elisabeth has long been a heavy smoker, up to 30 cigarettes a day. “I started smoking around the age of 15, she explains. I’m 65, so it’s been 50 years. I smoked a lot and I was a heavy smoker anyway”. Elisabeth volunteered to be part of the study, a two-year follow-up with three low-dose chest scans to detect possible early lung cancer. “It’s really the cancer that you don’t want to have. I’m going to be followed. For me, it’s a chance because if there is something, they will see it.”
Doctors will see it and can act early. Lung cancer is responsible for the greatest number of deaths today: more than 30,000 deaths per year in France. In all countries of the world, the idea of detecting it earlier is gaining ground. It will also be discussed at the World Cancer Congress in Chicago, which begins on Friday, June 3. “It is absolutely necessary to screen the patient at the stage where he has no symptoms, explains Professor Marie-Pierre Revel, of the Cochin hospital in Paris, at the head of this clinical study. This disease is very mute, the lung does not hurt. If we wait for the symptoms to appear, we will have an advanced disease. In 80% of cases, we will not be able to operate.
“When we detect very early, 80% of patients are operable because they are tumors, small lung cancers. We can operate and heal.”
Professor Marie-Pierre Revelat franceinfo
Two thousand four hundred women will participate in this study in Paris, Rennes, Béthune and Grenoble. All of them smoked at least one pack a day for 20 years or two packs for ten years. Why study women? Because more and more of them are developing lung cancer. For Professor Revel, it would be necessary in France to transpose what is already done for breast cancer with systematic screening in women from the age of 50. Establish organized, systematic and regular screening for lung cancer among heavy smokers. “We’re coming, continues Marie-Pierre Revel. It is a strong European injunction for the Member States to launch pilot studies in Italy, Germany and now in France with Cascade.”
These pilot studies are therefore taking place almost everywhere in Europe before perhaps generalizing systematic screening. The study hopes to show that any radiologist in France will be able to detect lung cancer very early. “Thoracic imaging experts like me, there are less than 50 in France, concludes Professor Marie-Pierre Revel. We need radiologists in the field, but who have been trained in screening and who will be helped by an artificial intelligence solution. We now have modern solutions with very few false positives and which play a role, a bit of a second reader.”
Croatia is the first country in the world to have launched a systematic lung cancer screening program two years ago for smokers over 50, todetect cancer before it’s too late.
Lung cancer: smokers participate in a pilot study of early detection – the report by Solenne Le Hen
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