Your Thoughts Matter

Health Care

CT scans and the national lung screening trial

Source: JournalistsResource.org

Globally, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death, and recently surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of smoking-related mortality. The National Cancer Institute estimates that this year in the U.S., more than 222,000 men and women will be diagnosed with the disease and 157,300 will die. The high mortality rate is in part a consequence of the difficulty in diagnosing the disease. Using chest X-rays, physicians typically discover lung cancers only at an advanced stage.