© 2005-2012 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). All rights reserved worldwide.
If you currently smoke, screening for lung cancer is not a substitute for quitting smoking. Quitting smoking is the only way to reduce your risk of lung cancer.
However, CT scanning may help find lung cancer earlier when treatment is likely to work better. The NLST showed that three lung cancer deaths were prevented for every 1,000 people who received CT screening. The benefit of screening also appeared to outweigh the risks of the radiation from the low-dose CT scans. There is a risk that CT screening can find abnormal areas in the lungs that are not cancerous. If an abnormal area is found on CT screening, more testing would still be needed to find out if it is cancerous or noncancerous. CT screening also increases the likelihood of being diagnosed with and treated for lung cancer because screening may sometimes find slow-growing cancers that would not have been found otherwise.
If you are considering lung cancer screening, it's important that it is done at a cancer center that can provide the complete support and resources needed for the screening, as well as evaluating the images, managing the results, and diagnosing and treating cancer.