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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 In the meantime, she said, efforts to curb lung cancer rates should be directed toward reducing or eliminating tobacco use.
"In my opinion," added Dr. George Simon, director of thoracic oncology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, "lung cancer screening should not be done outside the setting of a clinical trial, and this abstract highlights one of the reasons why. When you do a CT scan of the lungs, you could find the small nodules in the lung and many of them could be benign. And the detection of benign, asymptomatic, inconsequential nodules will lead to invasive procedures to diagnose what it is."
"Lung cancer screening can cause a lot of stress, financial and psychological consequences that are unintended," he said.
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A final analysis presented at the news briefing addressed challenges in the cancer research field. Specifically, cancer trials that take a long time to develop tend to recruit fewer participants, a new study found -- making it less likely that the trial will succeed in reporting meaningful results.
"The development of a clinical trial is a lengthy and laborious process, consuming, on median, 2.4 years and in excess of 370 steps internally to develop," explained the study's lead author, Steven K. Cheng, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Management Research in Healthcare at the Oregon Health & Science University.
Overall, 40 percent of nonpediatric therapeutic trials did not achieve their minimum projected patient accrual and, for important phase 3 trials, three of five did not meet their accrual objectives, he said.
Trials that took nine to 15 months to develop were more likely to get the participants they needed, whereas just 22 percent of those that took 27 or more months met their minimum recruitment goals.
The study did not look at whether the trials succeeded despite this limitation.
"We must pursue ways to improve efficiency," Cheng said, citing corporate models that might be adopted by the health-care community.
More information
The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more on lung cancer.
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Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Last updated 6/1/2009
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SOURCES: June 1, 2009, news conference with Julie Gralow, M.D., associate professor, oncology division, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle; Jennifer M. Croswell, M.D., acting director, NIH Office of Medical Applications of Research, Bethesda, Md.; Vivianne Tjan-Heijnen, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medical oncology, Maastricht University Medical Center, the Netherlands; Steven K. Cheng, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow, Center for Management Research in Healthcare, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Ore.; American Society of Clinical Oncology 2009 annual meeting, Orlando, Fla.
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