After being selected as one of five locations in Ontario to offer the new Ontario Lung Screening Program, St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton has performed more than 400 scans and detected early cancer in eight people, potentially saving lives.
The program, which is open to applications from anyone between 55 and 75 years old, who have smoked for more than 20 years, even non continuously, uses CT scans to detect lung cancer early enough to treat it before it spreads.
“Lung cancer screening reduces mortality by 20 per cent,” Dr. Christian Finley, Clinical Lead for the program at St. Joe’s, said. “It’s more impactful than almost any other form of screening. It’s massively important, about 75 per cent of people who present with lung cancer also have metastatic disease (disease that spreads to other parts of the body), so when you do this screening, 90 per cent of them have stage one disease and are curable.”
Patients with lung cancer are usually only diagnosed after becoming symptomatic, with around 70 per cent of diagnoses happening at an advanced stage, which can often be too late to treat effectively.
The cure rate for stage one lung cancer, if detected early enough, is close to 90 per cent, while the cure rate for stage four lung cancer drops to around four per cent.
Finley also spoke on the importance of encouraging family members to take part in the screening program, as the difference between being treated for stage one and stage four lung cancer can be huge.
“I encourage everyone to participate,” he said. “It’s such a highly stigmatized disease, and one of the most impactful things you can do is to motivate family members to participate. It’s such an empowering thing to have people come from a stigmatized disease and be saved by their family members, so especially at this time of year I would encourage everybody, if they have a loved one who’s a potential candidate, to drag them here kicking and screaming.”
St. Joe’s performs around 36 scans per week through the screening program, and was selected as one of the sites to expand the program to as it’s one of the busiest lung cancer centres in Ontario.
