An international association for the study of lung cancer has taken a pivotal role in furthering discourse with the international lung cancer community on how the medical community should take lung cancer screening forward.

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC; Aurora, CO, USA) released an initial statement to the US National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) at the World Lung Cancer Conference in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in April 2011, and also hosted a computed tomography (CT) screening workshop with over 75 international experts in the field. The findings from this workshop were published in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

This is a high priority for the IASLC since the NLST discovered that lung cancer deaths dropped by 20% when smokers were screened yearly for three years using low-dose spiral computed tomography (LDCT) compared to traditional chest X-ray. However, the findings also revealed that nodules were identified in one-fourth of the patients screening and of those, 96% were not cancerous.

“The data from the NLST trial provide the first evidence that LDCT lung cancer screening can save lives and thus is the most encouraging data we have had on the international stage with respect this disease for many years,” commented Prof. John Field, co-author of the study, chair of the IASLC Task Force on CT Screening and director of the lung cancer research program at the University of Liverpool Cancer Research Center (UK). “This is why we’ll look at ongoing international trials which will provide further information on the outstanding issues before considering the implementation of national CT screening programs.”

The IASLC has set up the Strategic CT Screening Advisory Committee (IASLC-SSAC) to define the optimal approaches to lung cancer screening. They will focus on six specific components of the lung cancer screening process including (1) identification of high risk individuals for lung cancer CT screening programs; (2) developing radiologic guidelines for use in developing national screening programs; (3) developing guidelines for the clinical work-up of ‘indeterminate nodules’ resulting from CT screening programmers; (4) guidelines for pathology reporting of nodules from lung cancer CT screening programs; (5) recommendations for surgical and therapeutic interventions of suspicious nodules detected through lung cancer CT screening programs; and (6) incorporation of smoking cessation practices into future national lung cancer CT screening programs.

The members of the Strategic CT Screening Advisory Committee (IASLC-SSAC) are engaging international professional societies and organizations who are stakeholders in lung cancer CT to gather data about best practices that may be utilized by individual nationals to suit their healthcare systems. Currently, there are over 12 such international participants who wish to work with IASLC SSAC on this project.

“This is a high priority for the IASLC since strategic screening has the potential to change the face of lung cancer in the coming years,” Prof. Field commented.
 

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