Development of a non-invasive test to distinguish cancerous from benign lesions in the lungs has innumerable implications for medicine as well as for patients who have gone through the stressful experience of waiting for biopsy results.
"CT screening results in the detection of lung nodules in 20 to 60 percent of subjects," said Dr. Anil Vachani, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in a statement from the American Thoracic Society. "This high false-positive rate requires patients to undergo extensive follow-up investigations, such as serial CT scans, PET scans or biopsies. This test may be able to obviate the need for such things if it is developed into a large scale diagnostic tool."
According to the statement, lung cancer is a very diverse disease, and screening for it can be very difficult. The researchers hoped to identify a stable and consistent way of determining the presence of lung cancer by testing for the gene expression of white blood cells.
