One-off low-dose CT lung cancer screening in China: an appropriate strategy?

Lung cancer is devastating, with a 5-year survival rate of about 10%. High smoking prevalence in the past means that millions of people are at high risk of developing lung cancer. Two large-scale randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have shown that screening with high-quality, low-dose CT (LDCT) can detect lung cancer substantially earlier than when being diagnosed symptomatically, and thereby reduce mortality from the disease by 8–24% (point estimates of trials) in men and by 26–61% in women.1,2 The LUSI RCT recently confirmed that repeated LDCT is associated with a reduction in lung cancer mortality in women.