By Nathan Seppa
From Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research
A new test might enable doctors to catch lung cancers that are missed by a commonly used diagnostic tool.
Each year in the United States, about 300,000 people get a chest X ray that shows a suspicious spot in a lung. That’s enough to warrant a bronchoscopy, in which a doctor inserts a lighted, flexible scope down a person’s windpipe to visually examine the cells. “The procedure detects cancer in about 75,000 of these patients, but twice that many are ultimately diagnosed with lung cancer, some after years of follow-up,” says Avrum Spira, a pulmonary care physician at Boston University School of Medicine.