The US Preventative Task Force has issued new guidelines that will greatly expand the number of people who who receive annual CT scans to screen for lung cancer. The new criteria recommends screening for people aged 50-80 who have smoked at least a pack a day for 20 years or more, and who still smoke, or have quit within the past fifteen years. These new lung cancer screening guidelines may save thousands of lives.

The new criteria lowers the threshold age from 55 to 50, and shortens the smoking history from thirty years to twenty. Lung Cancer is the leading cause of U.S. cancer deaths. It accounted for 135,720 deaths in 2020.

The shortening of the smoking history is significant for a number of reasons. Primarily, it expands the pool of patients to include more women and Black Americans, demographics that tend to have shorter smoking histories and have a higher likelihood of developing lung cancer, respectively. Ninety percent of lung cancer cases occur in people who smoke, and the likelihood of developing the disease is 20 times that of a nonsmoker.

The USPTF noted that the pool of patients grew to 14.5 million, more than double the 6.4 million qualifying under the previous criteria. It expects, too, that the new criteria will reduce the risk of death from lung cancer by about 20-25 percent. Screening for cancer is an important tool because it is used to identify cancer before it is symptomatic. With many cancers, symptoms start to appear with later stage cancer, making it harder to eradicate.

As the science evolves, these guidelines continue to get adjusted. For example, CT scan replaced X-ray years ago as the primary screening tool because X-rays proved to be unreliable in identifying lung cancer early enough to treat it.

The next step is ensuring patients get their screening, and that the imaging is read correctly: the pandemic has severely decreased the number of patients getting cancer screening exams. Likewise, malpractice, though unlikely, remains a risk.