United States: According to a new study, it is revealed that several nonsmokers are suffering from lung nodules, which have an association with lung cancer.
More about the study
It is found that around 42 percent of nonsmokers or previous smokers have the presence of at least one lung nodule, which, as experts state, is a tiny mass of dense tissue that may prove to be cancerous.
It is as per the chest CT scans done on more than ten thousand people aged 54 or older.
Moreover, it was also revealed that almost 11 percent of the participants had lung cancer nodules present, whose size measured around six to eight mm, which would need a close medical examination, as explained by the researchers, as US News reported.
What more did the experts state?
According to Dr. Rozemarijn Vliegenthart, who is a senior researcher and a professor of cardiothoracic imaging at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, “This was higher than we expected and even similar to the prevalence reported in high-risk populations of smokers,” as the US News reported.
The results also showed that older people had greater chances of having more lung nodules and larger size.
Moreover, as experts state, men would be more likely to have lung nodules than men.
According to Vliegenthart, in a university release, most of the lung nodules are not considered cancerous. However, he stressed, “The incidence of lung cancer in this population is very low, 0.3%, suggesting that most of the clinically relevant and even actionable nodules in a nonsmoking cohort are benign,” as the US News reported.
The findings
The study findings were published in the journal Radiology on August 13th. The result was obtained after a long follow-up performed on scans and examinations under current cancer screening guidelines.
“This shift makes our study, which provides foundational and comprehensive data on lung nodules in nonsmokers, even more critical,” Vliegenthart said.