Lung cancer: Deaths from lung cancer could be reduced by 50 per cent if a combined approach using two forms of screening for the disease was adopted, a leading European cancer expert has said.
Speaking at the third All Ireland Lung Cancer Conference in Adare, Co Limerick, Dr Ugo Pastorino, of the Istituto Nazionale Tumori, in Milan, Italy, said early detection of lung cancer with "spiral CAT scanning" could prevent 80-100,000 deaths every year in Europe.
The current overall survival from lung cancer is poor. Less than 10 per cent of people with the disease are alive five years after diagnosis is made.
"Late diagnosis of extensive disease is the main reason for treatment failure, since the long-term survival of people whose tumours are removed at an early stage is higher than 80 per cent," Dr Pastorino told the conference on Saturday.
He described a novel approach to lung cancer screening, recently studied in Italy, which included carrying out yearly CAT scans combined with the selective use of PET scanning in people at high risk of the disease - PET stands for positron emission tomography and is a highly accurate method of diagnosing cancer in humans.
The Republic has just one PET scanner located in the private Blackrock Clinic in Dublin.
The Italian study of more than 1,000 people aged 50 years and older who were regular smokers demonstrated that "curable detection can be achieved using this method", Dr Pastorino said.
He acknowledged the need to await the outcome of much larger studies currently being carried out in the United States and in Europe before a definitive decision on national cancer screening could be made.
Dr Finbar O'Connell, consultant respiratory physician at St James's Hospital, Dublin, told The Irish Times that "lung cancer is likely to eclipse breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer mortality in Irish women in the near future".
The incidence of lung cancer in women in the Republic is double the EU average and is continuing to increase.
Launching new guidelines for the clinical management of lung cancer - the result of two years work by an All-Ireland lung cancer working group made up of consultants from both the Republic and Northern Ireland - Dr O'Connell said the guidelines had the capacity to improve the outcome for lung cancer patients on the island.
"As things stand, services for lung cancer are disorganised and fragmented, and the care offered to the individual patient may depend more on geographical location than tissue diagnosis," he said.
"Yet the evidence is clear that early referral with rapid access to well-organised multidisciplinary care leads to improved short and long-term survival rates with a better quality of life."
Meanwhile, at the Irish Cancer Society's launch of the 2004 Daffodil Day campaign, Prof Desmond Carney, consultant medical oncologist at the Mater Hospital, said lifestyle changes involving diet and smoking reduction could reduce the overall death rate from cancer by over 20 per cent.
He estimated that new treatments contributed to reductions in cancer mortality of up to 26 per cent. Dr Carney said targeted therapies, with the ability to get right into cancerous cells, will "radically change our treatment of cancer".