What Goes into Patient Selection for Lung Cancer Screening? Factors Associated with Clinician Judgments of Suitability for Screening.

Núñez ER, Zhang S, Glickman ME, Qian SX, Boudreau JH, Lindenauer PK, Slatore CG, Miller DR, Caverly TJ, Wiener RS. What Goes into Patient Selection for Lung Cancer Screening? Factors Associated with Clinician Judgments of Suitability for Screening. American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine. 2024 Jan 15; 209(2):197-205.

Related HSR&D Project(s)

• IIR 18-075 – Achieving appropriate, safe, and patient-centered lung cancer screening

Dimensions for VA is a web-based tool available to VA staff that enables detailed searches of published research and research projects.

If you have VA-Intranet access, click here for more information vaww.hsrd.research.va.gov/dimensions/

VA staff not currently on the VA network can access Dimensions by registering for an account using their VA email address.    Search Dimensions for VA for this citation
* Don't have VA-internal network access or a VA email address? Try searching the free-to-the-public version of Dimensions

Search for Abstract from PubMed

---

Abstract:

Achieving the net benefit of lung cancer screening (LCS) depends on optimizing patient selection. To identify factors associated with clinician assessments that a patient was unlikely to benefit from LCS ("LCS-inappropriate") because of comorbidities or limited life expectancy. Retrospective analysis of patients assessed for LCS at 30 Veterans Health Administration facilities from January 1, 2015 to February 1, 2021. We conducted hierarchical mixed-effects logistic regression analyses to determine factors associated with clinicians'' designations of LCS inappropriateness (primary outcome), accounting for 3-year predicted probability (i.e., competing risk) of non-lung cancer death. Among 38,487 LCS-eligible patients, 1,671 (4.3%) were deemed LCS-inappropriate by clinicians, whereas 4,383 (11.4%) had an estimated 3-year competing risk of non-lung cancer death greater than 20%. Patients with higher competing risks of non-lung cancer death were more likely to be deemed LCS-inappropriate (odds ratio [OR], 2.66; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.32-3.05). Older patients (ages 75-80; OR, 1.45; 95% CI, 1.18-1.78) and those with interstitial lung disease (OR, 1.98; 95% CI, 1.51-2.59) were more likely to be deemed LCS-inappropriate than would be explained by competing risk of non-lung cancer death, whereas patients currently smoking (OR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.58-0.73) were less likely to be deemed LCS-inappropriate, suggesting that clinicians over- or underweighted these factors. The probability of being deemed LCS-inappropriate varied from 0.4% to 74%, depending on the clinician making the assessment (median OR, 3.07; 95% CI, 2.89-3.25). Concerningly, the likelihood that a patient is deemed LCS-inappropriate is more strongly associated with the clinician making the assessment than with patient characteristics. Patient selection may be optimized by providing decision support to help clinicians assess net LCS benefit.