A new Northwestern Medicine study found that current U.S. lung cancer screening guidelines miss most patients, especially women and never-smokers.
That's why Northwestern is putting together the Lung Health Center to detect lung, heart, and bone conditions earlier.
"Our goal is to bring a national change where we can convince the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which is a federal government entity, to, expand the lung cancer screening so that we can detect lung cancer and, frankly, other types of respiratory conditions earlier," said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and executive director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute.
According to Northwestern researchers, expanding the universal age-based screening to ages 40 to 85 would detect 94% of lung cancers, preventing more than 26,000 extra deaths annually.
Dr. Bharat said that's the goal of the new lung center.
"We put this center together to help us improve awareness about these issues in the community," he said. "Assuming that we could make that change and assuming that we can get people to screen, we can achieve our goal of detecting lung cancer at an early stage more than 80% of the time."
For 45-year-old Daniiele Hoeg of Chicago, this issue hits close to home. Hoeg has never smoked and was in perfect health when she was diagnosed with lung cancer.
"The spot on my lungs did light up, and with 99.9% certainty," she said. "I still thought, 'Well, no, no way is it lung cancer. I don't smoke. There's no reason for me to have lung cancer.'"
She said it's crucial that others have the same access to screenings and care that she did.
"I need other women, other young people, to have the same luck I did, and that's hard, for resource purposes, time purposes," she said. "This lung health center is going to hopefully help more people get access to regular screening that
they normally wouldn't."