Veterans decide CT lung cancer screening will help them continue to smoke

Linkbait-y title aside, JAMA Internal Medicine has an interesting new too-small too-ungeneralizable study of 35 veterans across multiple VAs. In it, 49% (i.e. 17 patients) admitted that the availability of CT lung cancer screening reduced their motivation to quit. Reportedly, quitting is hard and CT scans are easy.

 

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Of course, hunting for and even finding lung nodules isn’t going to prevent you from dying from cardiovascular disease or COPD, which together are responsible for over half of all smoking-related deaths. Nor will it touch the various other cancers smoking causes, like squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck, which I see all the time. CT lung cancer screening for high risk individuals is a no-brainer, the data are substantial, but quitting or never-starting needs to be as well!

 

 

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