Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: Early Detection is Key

One of the challenges with non-small cell lung cancer—the most common type of lung cancer—is that by the time it’s detected, it has often already spread to the brain, liver, or to the bones.

That’s where the importance of screening comes in. If caught early, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is more likely to have a favorable long-term prognosis, says Lynn Tanoue, MD, MBA, a Yale Medicine pulmonary critical care specialist and director of the Lung Cancer Screening Program.

A low-dose CT scan, Dr. Tanoue points out, offers detailed information about the lungs and takes only five minutes. An annual scan is recommended for anyone age 50 to 80 who smoked an average of one pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years.

If an imaging scan indicates potential cancer, a biopsy will be performed and can tell doctors what type of cancer it is. This is important because for lung cancer, there is NSCLC and small-cell lung cancer, and the treatments are slightly different.

“But for both of those kinds of cancers, there are now so many more therapies available than there were even five to 10 years ago,” Dr. Tanoue says.

And when the cancer is found early, physicians have more options in terms of surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and targeted therapy to offer patients, says Roy Herbst, MD, PhD, deputy director of Yale Cancer Center.

At Yale Medicine, physicians and researchers work together to determine treatments that can prolong life and potentially cure lung cancer by translating bedside questions into laboratory research.

In the video above, doctors talk more about these efforts.