What should you make of the new screening guidelines for lung cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

If you’re a current or former smoker, screening guidelines for lung cancer keep changing, with the newest guidelines from the American Cancer Society expanding the pool of people who would be eligible for CT screening. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins says he hopes the new guidelines will encourage more people to get screened.

Nelson: Between age 50 and 80 years if you are a smoker or you used to smoke and you had an exposure of 20 pack years, that means you say smoked one pack a day for 20 years half a pack a day for 40 years the challenge has been is that among all the screening that we do for cancer, mammography, PSA testing, adoption rates are significant but the adoption rate for this across the country has been pretty low. I think what people have pondered is if you make it very complicated and how you should recommend screening to it's just yet another stumbling block to get the right people to be screened.  :34

So former and current smokers should be screened. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.