Lung cancer is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, when treatment options are less effective. Therefore, survival rates are poor.
The National Lung Screening Trial, or NLST, showed a 20 percent decrease in lung cancer deaths and a 6 percent decrease in all-cause mortality when smokers were screened annually for three years with low-dose spiral computed tomography (CT) compared with standard chest radiography.
The challenge to clinical practice is to find an accurate risk model for predicting which patients would benefit most from screening. The Liverpool Lung Project (LLP) is a risk model developed to identify smokers' and nonsmokers' absolute five-year risk for lung cancer.
Researchers evaluated the accuracy of the LLP against the European Early Lung Cancer (EUELC) model and Harvard case-control studies.
The researchers found that the LLP risk model was simple and discriminating. It had good ability to distinguish persons who will or will not develop lung cancer, and it performed better than smoking duration or family history as a tool for deciding which persons to screen.