Over the past 10 years, the rate of new lung cancer cases diagnosed in America has dropped 19% and the five-year survival rate has increased 26%, according to a new report.
However, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death all across the US, and your chances of surviving lung cancer can depend on where you live.
Increase of the survival rate
The American Lung Association's report titled "State of Lung Cancer" found the national incidence rate of lung cancer from 2012 to 2016 was 59.6 cases per 100,000 people. Those rates depended by state, ranging from 27.1 in Utah to 92.6 in Kentucky.
According to the report, the five-year survival rate of lung cancer, which was 21.7% nationally, also depended by state, ranging from 26.4% in Connecticut to 16.8% in Alabama. Experts have known that detecting lung cancer early can improve chances of survival, but the stage at which someone is diagnosed with lung cancer was also found to depend by state. The report found that the early diagnosis rate was high for Wyoming, garnering 28.1% and lowest for Alaska, at 16.6%.
Zach Jump, the national director for epidemiology and statistics at the American Lung Association said that most cases are only caught at a very late stage. You do not get symptoms until it is very late and it is very developed.
If you get diagnosed at an early stage, which very few people are, the tumor's often limited, it hasn't spread and at that point, you are often eligible for surgery where they can cut it out and it is essentially curative. The difference between early diagnosis and a late one is about a five-time higher survival rate for the patient. He also added that one of the key messages from the report is for those at high risk to talk to their health care provider about screening.
Lung cancer screening
The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends current or former smokers with a smoking history of 30 or more years to undergo a lung cancer screening every year. They highly encourage those who smoked one pack a day for 30 years or two packs a day for 15 years. Those recommendations are for adults, from ages 55 to 80, who either currently smoke or quit within the past 15 years.
According to the report, the screening rates among adults found to be high risk were only 4.2% nationally. The screening rates among this group were from 12.3% in Massachusetts to 0.5% in Nevada.
The report was all based on data from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, Epidemiology and End Results Program, the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The researchers wrote that the report found that lung cancer rates for every measure depend on the sate and that every state can do more to defeat lung cancer like increasing the rate of screening among those a people that are labeled as high risk, addressing disparities in receipt of treatment, decreasing exposure to radon and secondhand smoke and eliminating tobacco use.
The report provides helpful information for state officials, researchers, policymakers and those people who are affected by lung cancer and the report emphasize the need for resources and it calls to action to decrease the toll of lung cancer across the country.
