Current and future perspectives on screening and detection of early lung cancer in Japan

Abstract

 Screening for lung cancer with chest X'ray is not currently recommended to asymptomatic persons except in Japan. There are several retrospective case-control studies showed decrease of mortality rate with lung cancer in the screened cohort. The recently reported NLST showed a 20% decrease in deaths from lung cancer in smokers with LDCT screening. The important issues to resolve will be identification of appropriate cohort for LDCT screening, development of guidelines for better performance of nation-wide screening using LDCT, well-designed management of screened nodules and integration of smoking cessation practices into future screening programmes.