More work is needed to clarify optimal surveillance of patients following curative treatment for lung cancer, the Asian Pacific Society of Respirology (APSR) Congress in Sydney was told.
Dr Emily Stone, a senior staff specialist in thoracic medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital, said preliminary data from the IFCT-0302 trial showed the addition of CT scans with or without bronchoscopy had no more effect on survival than a clinical exam and chest X-ray.
The French study of patients with resected non-small cell lung cancer found no difference in overall survival between the two groups after two years.
Dr Stone told the limbic the preliminary data did not rule out a benefit with longer follow-up.
“There are no robust data to follow at the moment so we all do what we do. Most of us, with guidelines based on expert opinion and consensus, do follow-up with six-monthly CTs for the first couple of years then if the patient is well, yearly to five years.”
“But there is no really good data to support that and now we are getting some data that is questioning the benefits of those six-monthly scans.”
She said the data also suggested there was possibly more benefit from detecting second primary cancers than recurrences.