Cardillo (Siet): “In 45% lung cancer patients diagnosed in an advanced stage”

“45% of patients who receive a diagnosis of lung cancer already have locally advanced disease or distant metastases. Life expectancy is closely linked to when the diagnosis is made: in the early stages the treatments give us results excellent small tumors operated on allow us to achieve 95% survival 5 years after diagnosis”, explained Giuseppe Cardillo, president of the Italian Society of Thoracic Endoscopy (SIET) and director of the Company’s complex thoracic surgery unit. San Camillo Forlanini hospital in Rome, on the occasion of the press conference in Rome to present the new Position Paper “Lung Cancer: Early Diagnosis is the main path”, created with the unconditional contribution of Johnson & Johnson MedTech.

“With 44 thousand new cases and 28 thousand deaths per year, lung cancer has an enormous social impact. Even at a European level: it is estimated that every 83 seconds a person dies from this cancer. While at a global level, where 1 million and 800 thousand deaths, it is as if a city like Milan disappeared every year”, underlines Cardillo “This is why it is essential to implement primary and secondary prevention interventions, combating smoking on the one hand and promoting early diagnosis with targeted screening on the other. to the population at risk,” he adds.

What, according to the expert, should be done is “identify patients who are currently healthy, but who have high risk factors, and focus our efforts on those to do a high-resolution, low-dose chest CT scan” , he says. “So little radiation for the patient but many results, quality images useful for finding lung and even cardiac pathologies. Furthermore, in my opinion, we should always combine radiological diagnostics with a clinic for the prevention of smoking,” he concludes.