Lung Cancer Screening Based on Personal Risk Is Cost-Effective

TUESDAY, Feb. 7, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Lung cancer screening strategies based on personal risk are more cost effective than the 2021 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations, according to a study published online Feb. 7 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Iakovos Toumazis, Ph.D., from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and colleagues examined and compared the cost-effectiveness of risk model-based lung cancer screening strategies versus the USPSTF recommendation in a modeling analysis. The risk model-based strategy started screening at age 50 or 55 years and stopped screening at age 80 years, with six-year risk thresholds of 0.5 to 2.2 percent based on the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial modified 2012 model.

The researchers found that the risk model-based screening strategies were more cost-effective than the USPSTF recommendation and comprised the cost-effectiveness efficacy frontier. Strategies with a six-year risk threshold of 1.2 percent or greater were cost-effective with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) <$100,000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY). The ICER was $94,659 for the strategy with a 1.2 percent risk threshold, which yielded more QALYs for less cost than the USPSTF recommendation, with a similar level of screening coverage (21.7 versus 22.6 percent for the risk model-based strategy and the USPSTF recommendation, respectively).

“Lung cancer screening strategies that select persons based on their personal lung cancer risk are robustly more cost-effective than the 2021 USPSTF recommendations,” the authors write.

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