One Halifax radiologist is sounding the alarm on the need for an organized early-detection program for lung cancer after a review she led revealed results that are shocking seasoned medical professionals.
“Recently, we did a review of lung cancer in Nova Scotia and some of our results were really breathtaking and really put a personal perspective on lung cancer,” Dr. Daria Manos said, a radiologist at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Science Centre.
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Dr. Manos says the review shows more than one-quarter of Nova Scotians find out they have lung cancer in emergency departments and often the disease has already progressed to a stage that’s too advanced to cure.
“To have these patients present so late in their disease is really quite awful. When a patient presents in an emergency department, it may not be the best place as you can imagine to receive a diagnosis of lung cancer,” Manos said.
“There are tons of questions, there’s tons of anxiety, people are presenting in crisis, their families are in crisis.”
According to Manos, this isn’t the first time a proposal to bring in an early-detection program has been pitched to the Nova Scotia Health Authority.
She says in 2016, the Canadian Task Force issued recommendations for provinces to implement lung-cancer screening for high-risk patients.
Following those recommendations, Manos says a proposal was submitted to NSHA in 2015 but financial barriers appear to be stalling the process.
“The major additional cost would be a salaried position for one person to organize the program, to counsel patients and to make sure that people get followed up as they should because you wouldn’t want someone just with the result and them not know what to do with it,” Manos said.
She adds that costs associated with an early-detection program would be cheaper in her eyes than continuing to manage the treatment costs of late-stage diagnosis.
“Unfortunately, when you diagnose lung cancer at a late stage, three or four, the expense is quite high. So even if somebody can’t have surgery, there are expenses for every effort we can make to treat them with chemotherapy and with other medications. There’s also the expenses related to the palliative care these patients need,” she added.
The NSHA says its monitoring the results of two-pilot programs currently underway in Alberta and Ontario to determine whether a similar program would work for Nova Scotia.
“The decision to fund the development and implementation of a lung cancer screening program for individuals at high risk for the disease must also be considered within the context of all other needs/requests for funding within the health system as a whole,” Dr. Drew Bethune said, the medical director of the NS Cancer Care Program.
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According to Dr. Daniel French, a thoracic surgeon in Halifax, lung cancer remains one of Nova Scotia’s most deadly diseases and is significantly more curable if discovered early.
“We see approximately 1,000 cases a year. The main advantage to early detection is we could potentially remove lesions that were either pre-cancerous lesions, so they have not yet become cancer but have the potential to do so or will,” Dr. French said.
He adds: “Our cure rate would be much higher if we could remove those lesions before they were actually tumours.”
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