“Campaigning against road deaths is good. But by passing a simple scan to heavy smokers, we could save 7,500 lives each year ”, says Charles-Hugo Marquette, head of the pneumology department at the Nice University Hospital questioned by Sunday Newspaper (JDD). In an article published on November 18, the doctor calls out with around thirty pulmonologists, oncologists or radiologists, the authorities to demand “Immediate management of screening by chest scanner” from 50 or 55 years old, among heavy smokers or former heavy smokers. In France, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death.
The objective in speaking to the weekly newspaper is also to take the opinion as a witness, explains in his pages Professor Gérard Zalcman, oncologist at Bichat Hospital (AP-HP) in Paris: “There is an urgent need to raise awareness, he pleads. The screening is reimbursed by insurance companies in the United States. All over Europe, numerous experiments are organized and financed. With us, we feel a certain reluctance, there is very little ”.
The risk of mortality reduced by 25%
Yet research presented in September in Toronto showed that chest CT screening in a population of heavy smokers reduced lung cancer mortality in men by 25% and in women by 40 to 60% – which more and more people are smoking. Out of more than 30,000 patients who die each year in France from the pathology, this would save 7,500 lives. Dubbed “Nelson”, this large-scale study was carried out on more than 10,000 people. The detailed results have not yet been published, but they already update those of a 2011 American report which estimated this decrease in mortality at 20%.
In 2016, the High Authority for Health (HAS) refused this screening, denouncing the dangers of radiation and an excessive risk of false diagnosis. But for specialists, the results of this new research should convince experts: “The number of false diagnoses is reduced by two thirds. In addition, these excellent results have been obtained in healthcare systems comparable to ours (in Belgium and the Netherlands, editor’s note) ”, argues Gérard Zalcman.
the JDD also questioned Fréderic de Bels, head of the Cancer Institute (Inca). According to him, if these new results will be studied in detail for a screening program to be reassessed by the HAS, the conclusions should not be made before 2020.
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