Search Here

A new study conducted by researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine says that patients who find out they have a spot on their lung often assume they have cancer when they don't.

According to a recent study conducted by the Boston University School of Medicine, patients make too much of a spot in their lungs assuming they have cancer when actually there's nothing seriously wrong with them. Researchers suggest that doctors could do more to help patients understand what happens when a "spot," or nodule, is found on a CT scan or chest x-ray, and what it means for their long-term health.

"On a CT (scan) we see them all - all the tiny little details and all the tiny nodules on the lung, and 99 percent of those are nothing, are not cancer," said Dr. Heidi Roberts, a radiologist and lung cancer specialist from Women's College Hospital in Toronto.

According to the researchers, "Non-cancerous nodules can be a result of scarring in the lungs, an infection or an inflammatory response initiated by the immune system."

Recent recommendations from the American College of Chest Physicians and the American Society of Clinical Oncology call for annual screening using CT scans for current and former heavy smokers age 55 to 74.

For the new study, researchers organized focus groups for 22 adults who had lung nodules that hadn't been definitively diagnosed as cancerous or non-cancerous. They asked the patients about their experiences talking with primary care doctors and lung specialists when the abnormality was caught.

Dr. Renda Soylemez Wiener of the Boston University School of Medicine and her colleagues found almost all patients immediately assumed they had cancer when they were told about the nodule.

In reality, the researchers reported in the journal Chest, after a couple years of check-ins typically less than one in 20 nodules turn out to be cancerous.

Most patients said they wanted doctors to use common, uncomplicated terms when describing the nodule, to draw them a picture or use the scan to show them how big it was and to estimate their chances of actually having lung cancer.

"A lot of times doctors kind of feel, we see pulmonary nodules so commonly that it seems like this is not a really big deal," Wiener told Reuters Health.

"If you want to biopsy all the nodules that are in the lung, it's just diagnostic overkill," Roberts, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

"There might be some that look a little bit more suspicious than others, but if it's a small nodule, we still would do the same follow-up," Roberts said.