This provocatively daft study suggests we should be instituting them. Over thirty thousand smokers were screened over roughly a ten year period and a little under five hundred cancers were discovered. Ten year survival rates in those operated on were 92% compared with an estimated 88% if the cancer had come to light without screening. You’ll look in vain for any discussion of the vast costs of a screening programme based on this, of the potential for damage both from radiation and over-diagnosis, and for any suggestion that the improved ten year survival rate was simply because cancers whose natural history were not being changed at all by treatment were being detected earlier . The conclusion is a masterpiece of pithy misdirection: “Annual spiral CT scanning can detect lung cancer that is curable.”

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