Catching things early

Case Study – Lung Cancer.

Approximately 50,000 people develop lung cancer each year in the UK. While the role of smoking is widely recognised as the biggest risk factor in development of lung cancer, there is growing concern amongst health professionals with regards to the increasing incidence of lung cancer in people who have never smoked, with over 350,000 cases occurring each year worldwide in this group.

Lung cancer still has the worst survival rate of all the major cancers with just 5% of people in the UK surviving 10+ years. Survival rates have not increased significantly over the last 40 years. However, detection at an early stage when the tumour is just a few mm in size greatly increases the chance of successful treatment to over 95% 10+ year survival.

CT scanning is the most sensitive means of detecting lung cancers and with Echelon Health’s experienced specialist chest radiologist, we have detected cancers as small as 1-2 mm. This is a far more sensitive scan than using x-rays which can generally only detect tumours of 10mm in size, and MRI scanning just cannot image the chest at all.

One of the organisations we work closely with analysed the detailed results of the CT Coronary Angiogram scans on 275 senior employees from a high profile and respected company a couple of years ago. The results demonstrated that for Coronary Artery Calcium scores (a measure of the overall extent of furring up), some 6.5% of the group had a score >400 which in some studies equates to a >20 fold increased risk of a heart attack.

Without a full health check up, this would not have been identified, especially as none of these employees showed any symptoms.

Worse still, the detailed CT angiogram images of the inside of the arteries of those same employees (utilising a resolution of just 0.3 mm) showed that:

• 8.3% had vulnerable ‘soft’ plaque only – this is the notorious ‘widow maker’ lesion and the one most likely to cause sudden death
• 4% had ‘soft’ plaques causing >50% stenosis (narrowing) and are the group most vulnerable to sudden death. This is classically the group who also have relatively few, if any risk factors for CHD, and are the Sunday joggers who sometimes, literally drop down dead.

By having a full health check up utilising a CT Coronary Angiogram, all these employees were able to take preventative measures to mitigate the future risk of a heart attack and early death.