American Cancer Society: More people should get screened for lung cancer
The American Cancer Society (ACS) has updated its lung cancer screening recommendations, expanding the pool of current and former smokers who should be screened for it every year.
New recommendations expand the age range for testing, to between 50 and 80. Previously, the age range had been 55 to 74. The group is also getting rid of a barrier to screening for former smokers. The previous guidelines said if you quit smoking more than 15 years ago, you didn’t necessarily need to be screened. Now even someone who quit 40 years ago might be eligible to be screened.
ACS estimates an additional 5 million Americans should be scanned under the new guidelines. The screening test is a low-dose computed tomography scan (also called a low-dose CT scan, or LDCT). [source]