Women screened for breast cancer are dying from lung cancer: An opportunity to improve lung cancer screening in a mammography population
Plain-language summary
This study examined whether women getting mammograms could also benefit from lung cancer screening, reviewing records of 18,040 women screened for breast cancer in 2015 at two facilities that offered both. Using a natural language processing algorithm plus manual chart review, the team identified 251 women who met USPSTF criteria for lung screening based on age and smoking history, but only 63 (25%) went on to enroll in lung screening. Among those who enrolled, three lung cancers were detected with no deaths, whereas among the 188 who were not screened, seven developed lung cancer and five died, pointing to a missed opportunity to catch lung cancer earlier in women already coming in for breast screening.
Read the full paper (DOI: 10.1177/09691413211013058).
This is a plain-language summary written for discoverability; the authoritative version is the published paper. Part of Travis Osterman's peer-reviewed publications.