By Maggie Fox
Washington - Annual scans can catch lung cancer when it is still curable, researchers reported on Wednesday in a study they said suggests a diagnosis of the disease may not have to be an immediate death sentence.
The findings, which have already ignited a disputed among cancer experts, support the argument that yearly computed tomography (CT) scans are worthwhile for smokers and others at high risk, the researchers said.
Although lung cancer kills 95 percent of its victims, a few patients in the study whose disease was caught early by the scans were still alive 10 years later.
"We believe this study provides compelling evidence that CT screening for lung cancer offers new hope for millions of people at risk for this disease and could dramatically reverse lung cancer death rates," Dr Claudia Henschke of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Centre, who led the study, said in an interview.
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"Annual spiral CT screening can detect lung cancer that is curable," Henschke and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.
But other experts immediately questioned the results and said the report was not the last word.
"What the data don't show us is that there been an actual decline in lung-cancer mortality. This study can't show us that because it is not a random comparison," said Dr David Johnson, of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, a former president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
It is possible the screening simply turned up more slow-growing tumours that would have caused little trouble for years, he said.
But Johnson called the study encouraging.
In 1999, Henschke and other researchers found that a type of X-ray called spiral CT scanning could detect 85 percent of small lung tumours while they could still be surgically removed.
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