Lung cancer must be detected earlier: experts

By Tan Ee Lyn
Lung cancer kills one person every minute in Asia, and in most cases, the disease was detected too late for effective treatment, medical experts said.
Authorities must consider ways for early detection of lung cancer including greater use of CT (computed tomography) scans as a more proficient tool in detecting the disease than chest X-rays, they said.
"Now, 60 to 70 percent of lung cancer cases are diagnosed at the late stage, so most would have an incurable disease upon diagnosis," said Tony Mok, a professor at the clinical oncology department at Hong Kong's Prince of Wales Hospital.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in men and women and more than 570,000 people die from it in Asia each year.
Fewer than half of the people who develop lung cancer live for more than a year and only 15 percent of victims survive beyond five years from the time of diagnosis.
Smoking is widely seen to be the major cause of lung cancer and the disease is expected to weigh heavily on Asia in coming years as the number of smokers continues to rise.
Mok said authorities in Asia should consider better and more efficient ways to detect the killer disease.
He cited a program in the United States where the National Cancer Institute is trying to discover if CT scans may be more proficient than chest x-rays in detecting the disease.
But imposing such a scheme in a country as populous as China could be difficult.
"If you don't have the disease, do you want a regular CT scan and who pays for it? In China, 320 million people smoke, and if over 150 million of them are over 50 years old, are you going to CT scan them every year?" Mok said.
There were nearly 498,000 newly diagnosed cases of lung cancer in China in 2005, up from 381,487 in 2000.
"It's an epidemic. In Western countries, we have more than 1 million new cases a year. In Asia, especially China, we expect 1 million new cases by 2015," said Giorgio Scagliotti, respiratory medicine professor at the University of Torino in Italy.
The two experts were at a major lung cancer conference in Seoul in South Korea this week.
The World Health Organisation has warned that smoking could end up killing 2.2 million Chinese a year by 2020.
Besides smoking, exposure to harmful substances such as arsenic, asbestos, radioactive dust, or radon can increase the risk for lung cancer.