Conference Coverage
Sex-based differences in lung cancer screening intervals suggested
Prior studies to see whether longer screening intervals were safe have yielded mixed results, possibly because of differences in clinical and...
TORONTO – A proposed change to CHEST’s lung cancer screening guideline calls for raising the upper age for screening recent cigarette smokers to 77 years of age from 74 years of age.
This proposal is part of draft guideline that was unveiled during the CHEST annual meeting but is still subject to tweaking by peer review until formal release in early 2018. The draft also offers expanded guidance on how to implement screening, containing three times as many recommendations as the current lung cancer screening guidelines (Chest. 2013 May; 143[5 Suppl]:e78S-e92S).
“We want screening to expand in a safe and effective way,” said Peter J. Mazzone, MD, chair of the expert panel that is preparing the revision for CHEST and a pulmonologist at the Cleveland Clinic. “We are less restrictive with these guidelines” than in the 2013 version.
Dr. Mazzone cited two major changes that will produce modest broadening of the criteria that determine which patients can appropriately get screening. The clearest change was the age range, which expanded from 55-74 years of age set in 2013 to reflect the age criterion for enrollment in the National Lung Screening Trial (New Engl J Med. 2011 Aug 4; 365[5]:395-409). Dr. Mazzone explained, though it remains short of the 80-year old ceiling recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.
The second, subtler change eased back on the outright ban that the 2013 guidelines placed on screening anyone who falls outside the target age range and smoking history (at least 30 pack years and either being a current smoker or having recently quit within the past 15 years) and who is without severe comorbidities.
The guidelines from 2013 said that screening people who fell outside these limits “should not be performed.” In contrast, the new draft guideline simply said that people who fall outside of the age and smoking-history criteria but who are still considered high risk for lung cancer based on a risk-prediction calculator should not “routinely” undergo screening. Additionally, exceptions could be made for certain patients whose high risk appears to warrant screening, Dr. Mazzone and others from the expert panel noted.
The revision specified that a high-risk person outside of the core criteria might still be a reasonable candidate for screening if this person tallies at least a 1.51% risk of developing lung cancer during the next 6 years according to the PLCOM2012 risk calculator (New Engl J Med. 2013 Feb 21; 368[8]:728-36).
“Some of the evidence allowed us to be a little more flexible,” though not to the point of “opening screening widely” to people who fall outside the core target population; rather, clinicians get to have a little more discretion, said Dr. Mazzone, who directs the Cleveland Clinic’s Lung Cancer Program. “We hope this will lead to more patients being screened in a high quality way,” he said in an interview. The panel strove to “look beyond the National Lung Screening Trial and find other groups of patients who could benefit” from screening. “We say that other high-risk people should not, on the whole, be screened” but that clinicians could consider individuals as appropriate for screening on a case-by-case basis.
The revision “fills in the outline” for screening that was established in the 2013 guidelines, said Gerard A. Silvestri, MD, a member of the revision panel, in a video interview. The updated guideline better detailed who benefits the most from screening and who benefits less, as well as the potential complications screening may cause, said Dr. Silvestri, a professor of medicine and lung cancer pulmonologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
“The sweet spot for screening is patients with a medium lung cancer risk without many comorbidities. We are trying to come up with individualized risk profiling,” explained Dr. Silvestri during the CHEST session. He noted that, in the screening program he runs in Charleston, every person who contacts the program and is interested in screening undergoes risk profiling. Are there people with a risk profile that justifies screening but fall outside the proposed criteria? “Absolutely,” Dr. Silvestri said.
People considering screening also need to recognize its potential harms, noted Renda Soylemez Wiener, MD, another member of the expert panel who spoke at the meeting. She cited five potential harms: death or complications from a biopsy of a screen-detected nodule, surgery for a screen-detected lesion that turns out to be benign, the psychosocial impact of finding a lung nodule, over diagnosis, and the cumulative radiation exposure from serial low-dose chest CT scans. “All of these dangers are real and may be magnified or mitigated as low-dose CT screening is implemented in real world practice,” said Dr. Wiener, a pulmonologist at Boston University.
In addition to four evidence-based recommendations that help define who is and isn’t an appropriate screening candidate, the revised guideline also included 11 mostly consensus-based “suggestions” about how screening programs should ideally operate. These covered issues such as identifying symptomatic patients who require diagnosis rather than screening, having strategies to encourage compliance with annual screening, including smoking cessation treatments in screening programs, and having strategies that minimize overtreatment of potentially indolent cancers.
The goal of these suggestions is to help in the design of high-quality screening programs, said Dr. Mazzone. “It’s not just who you screen but also how you screen.”
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