Low-dose computed tomography lung cancer screening in the Medicare program: Projected clinical, resource, and budget impact.

In this study presented by Dr. Joshua A. Roth recently at the ASCO meeting, they used a model to forecast the 5-year results of implementation of a screening program (as suggest the NLST, age older than  55 with at least 30 pack-years of smoking history) in comparison to no screening program. They modeled various scenarios involving faster and slower diffusion of the program. The number of lung cancer detected at the localize stage will raise from 15% to 32% with 54900 of new lung cancer diagnoses, but the cost of this advantage will exceed 9.3 $ billion.